fullybooked2017

THE DRY …Between the covers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dry is published by Little, Brown, and is available here.

January 13, 2017 0

THE DARBY FAMILY MURDERS

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There are trusting and optimistic souls who will tell you that no man is born evil, and no man is incapable of redemption. Unfortunately, the history of crime is riddled with examples of people who have simply been devoid of any sense of decency and have no moral compass whatsoever. Such a person was Edgar Edwards. Despite having only just been released from prison for earlier misdeeds in the autumn of 1902, he still believed he was smarter than the law – and his potential victims.

Seeing a newspaper advertisement for the sale of a Camberwell grocer shop, Edwards presented himself to John William Darby, at his shop, 22 Wyndham Road, in the south London borough of Camberwell. On visiting the shop in early December 1902, he explained to Darby and his wife Beatrice that the shop was just what he was looking for, and that he would take it on, and put a manager in place immediately. Before describing what happened next, we should take a moment to explain the murder weapon. Older readers will be familiar with sash windows. The concept seems alarmingly complex now, but basically, a heavy window frame could be raised and lowered with the help of a heavy iron counter-weight, hidden from view within the frame, and connected to the frame with a stout cord. Edwards arrived for his meeting with Darby armed with both sash weight and cord. It is believed that he bludgeoned to death Darby and his wife, and then used the cord to strangle their 10 month old daughter Ethel.

screen-shot-2017-01-11-at-19-30-07 Having done the deed, Edwards concealed the bodies in a room above the shop, and installed his shop manager, a man named Goodwin. Goodwin and his wife ran the business for a few days, presumably oblivious of the dead bodies lying above the shop. In the meantime, Edwards had taken Darby’s gold watch and chain, and pawned it for cash. He had also rented a separate premises in the east London borough of Leyton, and on 10^th December he explained to Goodwin that he was going to sell the Camberwell shop.

In a sequence that would probably be dismissed as preposterous if pitched as a movie screenplay, Edwards then dismembered the remains of the Darby family, and transported them in hessian sacks to Church Road, Leyton, where he buried them in the back yard. Thinking he had become a criminal genius, Edwards decided to reprise his masterstroke. Unfortunately for him, his assault on another shopkeeper, this time a man named Garland, misfired. Garland was able to escape and fetch the police. When Edwards was arrested, the police found John Darby’s business cards among Edwards’ possessions, and after excavating the back yard at Leyton and finding the remains of the Darby family, the police had more than enough evidence to charge Edwards with murder.

His trial at The Old Bailey was something of a foregone conclusion, brightened only by speculation as to whether Edwards would plead insanity. It was revealed that there was a strong streak of mental illness in his family. His mother and an aunt had died insane; one of his cousins was in an asylum and two others were what contemporary newspapers called “mental defectives”. Edwards was found guilty and apparently burst into manaical laughter when he was sentenced to death. As he stood on the scaffold on 3^rd March 1903, it is alleged that he turned to the prison chaplain, giggled, and said, “I’ve been looking forward to this lot!”

The Little Shop of Horrors at 22 Wyndham Rd, Camberwell, where the entire Darby family was murdered for greed and gain by Edgar Edwards in 1902 remained one of London’s most notorious murder houses for many years. In 1906, George R Simms noted that the shop had changed hands twice since the murders. Country folks, ignorant of its history, have taken on the business, but found out about the dreadful deeds enacted unders its roof – and left again. Another writer noted that the shop had stood empty for many months after the murders, since no-one wanted to live or do business in a building with such terrible memories, even at a reduced rent. He went on to say,

“It had a very desolate look when I walked past it some months after the killings, but on walking there a few years later I saw that a saddler and harness maker had set up business there.”

It seems that the shop stood until the 1940s or 50s, after which it disappeared, perhaps as a result of wartime bombing or peacetime redevelopment.

January 11, 2017 0

INTERVIEW . . . Joseph Knox

Sirens, the debut novel from Joseph Knox, has hit the crime fiction world like a cruise missile in these first days of 2017. On one level a police procedural, Sirens takes off in several different directions, and is full of wickedly sharp prose and a kind of grim poetry that shines an unforgiving light on modern Manchester and its criminal underworld. You can read our review of the book here, but it is a pure pleasure to have the author answering a few questions.

Tell us something about your background, and how you came to be a writer.

I began writing from a very young age. I was an insomniac as a kid and my parents quickly realised that giving me books and notebooks would stop me wandering round the house at night making trouble. I was sketching out short stories, comedy routines and characters as soon as I could hold a pen. Every word of it was shit – but it was a great early lesson in what writing really is: sitting alone for many hours, trying to reach that perfect moment where you forget you’re a person, forget you’re a boy in his bedroom writing, and begin to inhabit whatever world you’re writing about.

For readers who have yet to meet Aidan Waits, run through his CV.

Aidan is already on his very last chance as a detective when he’s caught stealing drugs from evidence. Although he uses substances, the reasons for his theft aren’t so cut and dry. He’s already an outsider. An unnatural fit for the job, he has a keen eye for detail and human frailty but is disconnected from those around him and filled with anger. The source of this anger, and Aidan’s self-destructive tendencies, is a key plot point of the book. There are flashes that he might be a keen detective, even a good man, but due to several things, might be too compromised to do the right thing.

It seems from Sirens that you have a love-hate relationship with Manchester. Give us some idea of your impressions of the city. Was it a wrench to move to London, or a relief?

A perceptive question! I’d say my relationship with Manchester leans more towards love. I grew up in Stoke on Trent and, to me, Manchester was the big city. It was where I dreamt of running away to, where I did run away to when the time came. It was the first place I ever really had my heart broken. The first place I had my nose broken. I failed in every way possible when I lived there – financially, romantically and personally. But I always appreciated it; to be surrounded by beautiful buildings, many of which clashed with garish modern things; to be surrounded by more art, artists, love and imagination than I could understand; to walk from one side of the city to another over the course of several hours, watching all kinds of strange, new people. The more I write and think about it, the more I love it. But I know my life would be very different if I’d stayed. Perhaps I never would have made it out of those basement bars Aidan’s stuck in?

Staying with Greater Manchester, it seems to me that it has always ‘punched above its weight’ in terms of awful criminal deeds. Given the history of villainy which includes Brady and Hindley, Trevor Hardy, Harold Shipman and Dale Cregan, do you think that is a fair assessment?

Punching above its weight is a pretty good line for Manchester in general. Like all truly great cities, it offers possibilities. Annihilation and salvation. The atmosphere of Manchester is both breathtakingly beautiful and bluntly cruel. Why wouldn’t that broadcast out to the population?

Sirens is almost blacker than Noir. Which authors from the darker end of the crime fiction street have influenced you?

James Ellroy is very important to me. As are the obvious hard noir guys like David Peace etc – and the weirder ones like James Sallis. The biggest influence on me as a writer, though, is Ross MacDonald. Archer is a man trying to understand people, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. As the world gets crueler, that’s more important. Certainly as Aidan finds himself surrounded by enemies and, at a certain point in the novel I think it’s fair to say, finds himself totally doomed, his sympathy – rather than his bravery – is what I admire most.

Sirens is a great title. Are we talking blue flashing lights or voluptuous ladies luring sailors to their death?

Thank you. The first time I thought of Sirens as a title for this book (working title was: Women Who Love Men Who Love Drugs) was when listening to There There by Radiohead. Thom Yorke’s wonderful line; ‘There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwrecks’ seemed to sum up Aidan’s plight.

There’s so much to love about the word. Sex, danger, lights, noises, police, women, temptation. Could be a straight description of the almost-mythic women in the novel. A nod towards Aidan’s weakness for them. A nod towards what might happen to him if he succumbs to this weakness. But, yes, also a reference to the police. Their corruption is a major theme of Sirens. A combination of the two meanings, a police siren and a destructive siren, could even give the impression that the real danger in this novel is on the side of the law…

The craze for anything Scandinavian in crime fiction seems to have passed. With your experience of selling crime books to the public, what do you think will be ‘the next Big Thing’?

Ah! No one ever gets this shit right and why would they want to? The joy of books is surprise – a line, a title, a bestseller. I also read as much around the map as possible to avoid trend books. With that said, in general fiction I’ve recently been enjoying a lot of Faction. That is to say, novels which combine fact with fiction – perhaps even ones where the authors themselves can be characters. Perhaps not a future trend, but an idea of some crime books that’d turn my head.

What next for Aidan Waits?

Aidan Waits will return in 2018 in The Smiling Man. Based on a real-life unsolved murder. One of the most maddening and confounding I’ve ever encountered, mesmerising, kaleidoscopic evil, with surprisingly little written about it. I want each of the Waits novels to be a different kind of crime novel. The first is the undercover book. This is Aidan and his monstrous partner Sutty investigating a real case and driving each other mad.

The Waterstones Exclusive of Sirens contains a Waits short story which takes place after the events of Sirens, and lightly sets up the events of book two…

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January 11, 2017 0

SIRENS . . . Between the covers

This debut novel from Joseph Knox is a dark and existential policier set in a modern Manchester where the neon lights of drug fuelled night clubs cast their garish glow over abandoned nineteenth century warehouses flanking polluted rivers which once powered the cotton mills that made the city great. Out in the suburbs, in houses built for long dead mill-owners, girls barely past their GCSEs jostle each other to get the attention of the organised crime barons who control the flow of narcotics and young flesh.

Aidan Waits is a young policeman who has a liking for pharmaceutical products that anaesthetize him from life. All is well until he is snared in a sting. He is caught sampling marching powder from the police evidence locker, and he is, as they say, bang to rights. He is given a grim choice by his boss. Option one is that his corruption is made public, but he will then be suspended and disappear into the darkness of the Manchester night. Beneath this façade, however, he will actually be working to bring down one of the most dangerous and powerful of the gang bosses. Option two is similar, except that he will be hauled through the courts and given serious jail time. And we all know what happens to policemen when they are thrown into prison.

So, Waits plays a dangerous double game which involves being undercover yet in full view. This paradox is essential. Obviously drug lord Zain Carver will know that Waits is a suspended copper; the deception will only work if Waits can convince the gangster that he is prepared to damage his former employers with leaked information. It requires no acting ability whatsoever for Waits to appear dissolute, addicted and troubled – that is his normal persona. However, a big problem looms. A rich and influential Member of Parliament has “lost” his teenage daughter. Isabelle Rossitter is one of the satellites fizzing around the planet Carver. Daddy is desperate to get her back, and Waits is given the task.

To say that Waits is a complex character is an understatement to rival Laurence Oates’ gentle assertion that he was “just going outside, and may be some time.” Waits’ childhood is never far from his thoughts, and those thoughts are not positive. He and his little sister were effectively abandoned by a mother who simply didn’t want them. Footsteps echoing along the cold and love starved corridors of institutional homes still ring in his ears, and the distant rejection isn’t just a scar – it is an open wound.

When a grossly polluted brick of heroin cuts a fatal swathe through a teenage party, the result is every bit as deadly as an American High School shooting. In consequence, Waits is cut adrift by both his police handler and his underworld connections. Death stalks his every move, and he finds himself one of the few remaining pieces on the board in a deadly endgame. Waits lurches back and forth through a nightmare world of abusive sex, wasted lives, casual violence and police corruption. The novel scarcely ever emerges from the flickering strobe-lit decadence of the Manchester night. There are times when Knox writes with the kind of savage poetry that reminded me very much of the great Derek Raymond.

“ The daylight was awful. It floodlit the insane, the terminally ill, turned loose again for the day, laughing and crying and pissing their pants through the streets. It was like the lights going up at last orders, turning the women from beautiful to plain, exposing the men for what they all are at their worst. Ugly, identical.”

This is a brutal, clever and beautifully written book. Knox hands Waits a guttering candle of compassion, and he manages to keep it alight despite gusts of wind that carry the reek of decay, hatred, perversion and lust. It is scarcely credible that this is a debut novel. Knox has penned a black tale which is certainly not a comfort read. There are passages which made me physically wince, but the author has the confidence to give us an ending, once the mayhem has died down, which is both bitter-sweet and poignant. As Milton wrote, at the conclusion of Samson Agonistes:

“His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event:
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent.”

Sirens is published by Doubleday, and will be available on 12th January

January 9, 2017 0

COMPETITION TIME …Win the new book by Eva Dolan

The first Fully Booked competition for 2017 has a fantastic prize – the eagerly awaited fourth novel from a writer who is regarded as one of crime fiction’s fastest rising stars – Eva Dolan. Watch Her Disappear is not on sale until 26^th January, but you could be well ahead of the game if you win this competition.

It’s a little trickier than usual, but great fun. Watch the YouTube video, and listen to the five famous pieces of music. Identify the composer of each, then take the first letter of their surname. That will give you an anagram of the surname of a famous screen detective.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE IMAGES! They have nothing to do with the competition, but are just for looking at while you work out who the composers are.

So, for example, if there were six pieces of music, and you identified Liszt, Schubert, Orff, Handel, Mahler and Enescu, that would give you L, S, O, H, M and E making, of course HOLMES!

With your answer as the subject, just email:

fullybooked2016@yahoo.com

Your name will go into the hat, and a winner will be drawn in the usual way. The competition closes at 10.00pm GMT on Sunday 15^th January. Due to postage costs, entry is restricted to people who live in Great Britain and the Irish Republic. Click the image to watch the video:

RULES

Competition closes 10.00pm London time on Sunday 15th January 2017.
One entry per competitor.
All correct entries will be put in the proverbial hat, and one winner drawn.
The winner will be notified by email, and a postal address requested

January 6, 2017 0

PURGED … Between the covers

Ordained Baptist minister Peter Laws (right) has produced a 110mph debut crime thriller featuring Matt Hunter, a former clergyman and now devout sceptic who, like most fictional crime consultants, has special skills which make him invaluable to the police in murder cases. I don’t know if Laws has himself gone down the same Road to Damascus In Reverse as his fictional character, but the depth and bitterness of Hunter’s scepticism about God and all His works certainly makes for compelling reading.

Hunter is in a seemingly idyllic Oxfordshire village with his family, taking a sabbatical while his architect wife prepares to put in her bid for the contract to build an extension to Hobbs Hill church. If you are expecting a saintly country vicar with kindly eyes and a dwindling congregation, you will be in for a rude awakening. This church has become home to a congregation of over three hundred, and is led by a charismatic minister who goes in for full-immersion Baptism and the kind of wild call-and-response services which seem to be de rigeur in ‘new’ churches.

First, an anorexic teenage girl goes missing, and then a lesbian artist who is in the terminal throes of stomach cancer disappears. Matt Hunter is sucked into the investigation via the simple ruse that photos of the missing women turn up as attachments in his email box. They stay there for a few hours but then mysteriously morph into pictures of a rainbow accompanied by a smiley face GIF.

The slightly manic minister of the Hobbs Hill church is no stranger to Matt Hunter. He and Chris Kelly studied together at bible college, where Kelly was an awkward and unpopular student due to his fervent proselytising and strange behaviour. Hunter tries his best to be diplomatic with the over-intense church folk, if only to help his wife get the design commission, but when the isolated cottage where his family are staying becomes the target of sinister visitors, he senses that there is something malign lurking beneath the joyous born-again aura of Kelly and his congregation.

Peter Laws captures the essence of New Age Christian church groups in all their arm-waving, eyeball-rolling, tongues-speaking exuberance. We have the obligatory performance stage, complete with sound-system and live rock group, and every single man woman and child in the congregation has a steely determination to play The Ancient Mariner and grasp innocent visitors by the arm to save their souls from eternal damnation.

The concept of a small community gripped by a pervasive religious cult is not new. We have been there many times, and our tour guides have included Stephen King, John Connolly, Phil Rickman and John Wyndham. Laws grabs the cliché with great enthusiasm, and manages to conjure up menace from ostensibly benign surroundings. He also spins the tale cleverly so that we are persuaded to look in completely the wrong direction for the culprit, and he keeps us blind-sided until the last few pages of the book.

The only blot on the landscape for me was a literal one: the powerful and noisy waterfall, Coopers Force, which is central to events in the story, seemed out of place in the gentle hills and meandering streams of Oxfordshire. I could picture the feature in The Lakes, Scotland, Snowdonia, or the Pennines, but such an elemental force of nature didn’t seem to belong in the golden Cotswolds. That aside, I found Purged to be exciting, convincing and well written. Best of all, it has that one essential feature of all good novels – the reader actually cares what happens to the main actors in the drama.

Purged is published by Alison & Busby, and will be available on 16th February. You can pre-order a copy here.

January 3, 2017 0

ALL OF A WINTER’S NIGHT … Between the covers

The great journalist and broadcaster Ed Murrow said of Winston Churchill, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle..” I believe that the best writers do the same with the landscape their characters inhabit. My theory applies to ‘serious’ literature as well as crime fiction: just as Hardy used his thinly disguised Wessex, the London of Charles Dickens is a major character in many of his novels; Arnold Bennett’s tales brought the Staffordshire Potteries to life, while for both DH Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe, Nottinghamshire was vital to their writing. Phil Rickman’s terrain is the borderland between Herfordshire and Wales, with its isolated villages, abandoned chapels, insular farmers and villages where the past is sometimes more real than the present.

All Of A Winter’s Night is the latest episode in the turbulent career of the Reverend Merrily Watkins. Her philandering husband long since dead in a catastrophic road accident, Merrily has a daughter to raise and a living to make. Her living has a day job and also what she refers to as her ‘night job’. She is Vicar of the Herefordshire village of Ledwardine, but also the diocesan Deliverance Consultant. That lofty term is longhand for what the tabloids might call “exorcist”. If you are new to the series, you could do worse than follow the link to our readers’ guide to The Merrily Watkins Novels.

A young man has died after his off-road vehicle has been mangled – along with his face – in a collision with a speeding white van on a country lane. Merrily presides over a funeral made difficult and perfunctory by the visible animosity between various members of the lad’s family. The fates are determined that Aidan Lloyd will not rest in peace, however. His body is disinterred, re-dressed in the uniform of a Morris dancing team from the village of Kilpeck, and then clumsily reburied.

At this point, three regular characters in this successful series intervene. Local JCB driver, drainage man, grave-digger and savant Gomer Parry is worried that his cemetery handiwork has been compromised, while emotionally fragile singer-songwriter (and boyfriend of Merrily) Lol Robinson just happens to be passing, along with Jane Watkins, daughter of Merrily, and full time pagan and environmental activist. They discover that mischief has been perpetrated on poor young Lloyd, little realising how their discovery will compromise Merrily, who is fighting what appears to be a losing battle to retain her job in the face of opposition from a modernising Bishop of Hereford.

The shocks and scares come thick and fast, but Rickman is much too good a writer to use a shovel to apply the chills and horror: instead, he uses the finest of squirrel-hair brushes, and we readers suffer endless torments of subtle suggestions, veiled threat and a pervading sense that all is far from well. There is more than enough conventional crime, dealt with – as always in the series – by expat Scouse cop Frannie Bliss and his secret girlfriend (and boss) Annie Howe, whose estranged father is making a bid to become the areas Police and Crime Commissioner.

The novel plays out against a bleak and gloomy Herefordshire November, where the brooding hills are shrouded with mist, and the outlying villages clinging to the steep slopes are uninviting, with doors remaining firmly shut in the faces of anyone “from off”. The sense of menace is compounded by the fact that both Merrily and the well-meaning local police come to realise that the death of Aidan Lloyd has opened a gateway into something which lies deeply embedded in the memory, landscape and folklore of a land where belief and conviction are older and more potent than modern concepts such as law and order. There are more deaths, and this time there is no pretence that they are accidental.

The snow, long threatened, sweeps in from the Black Mountains.

“NOT LONG AFTER ten p.m., it began like a few grey feathers blown from a nest. Soon it was filling the cracks in the walls and gleaming like epaulettes on the sagging shoulders of the graves in the churchyard.”

Merrily prepares for a service of Remembrance for the souls of both Aidan Lloyd and Kilpeck’s late vicar, but this no ordinary service. It coincides with the winter solstice, what John Donne called “The Year’s Midnight”, and will close with an appearance of the Kilpeck Morris, who will dance in honour of The Man of Leaves, one of the images carved into the church fabric. In a breathtaking conclusion to the book, this unique conjunction of the Sacred and the Pagan is shattered in the most dramatic way possible.

Whatever your New Year resolutions were, add another one to the list, but put it at the top. By fair means or foul, get hold of a copy of this book, switch the phone into answer mode, bolt the door and pretend there’s no-one at home while you are swept along by the brilliant writing. Oh, and a couple more things; if you thought that Sheelanagig was just a West Country folk band, you will be educated otherwise. And you’ll never look at a Morris dance team in quite the same way again.

All Of A Winter’s Night is published by Corvus, and is out on 5th January.

January 1, 2017 0

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 … The winner!

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THE FULLY BOOKED BEST BOOK OF 2016

We already have selections for Best Dialogue, Best Historical Novel, and Best Psychological Thriller. Next up came the awards for Best Non-UK Novel, Best Police Procedural and Best PI Novel. Now, though, it’s drum roll time, and this is the book which, for me, was the outstanding publication of 2016.

Strange Tide by Christopher Fowler
The Peculiar Crimes Unit is a kind of lost property facility for London’s Metropolitan Police. Orphan crimes, unsolved murders, unexplained disappearances – in short, investigations which would cost the cash-strapped Met Police valuable man hours are left on the doorstep of the PCU. Its two senior detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May are impossibly ancient but have an irreplaceable knowledge of London’s unique criminal history. The odd couple, particularly the apparently shambolic Bryant, have an almost visceral connection to the countless misdeeds committed on the capital’s ancient streets and lanes.

But all is not well. Arthur Bryant is physically sound enough, but his encyclopaedic mind is starting to betray him. He is suffering episodes of serious dislocation. He causes havoc in what he thinks is an academic library when he’s actually in the soft furnishings department of British Home Stores. While soaking up the ambiance of a Thames-side crime scene, all he can sense are the sights, sounds and smells of the early 20th century docks. John May and the more sprightly members of the PCU have to keep Arthur virtually under lock and key, for his own protection.

While trying to stop Arthur from wandering off and doing himself a mischief, the PCU team are investigating a bizarre death. A disturbed young woman has been found – drowned – chained to a concrete block on what had been an artificial Edwardian beach on a neglected section of the riverbank. She was several months pregnant, but her insouciant chancer of a boyfriend is innocent of both her demise and her impregnation. Why was there only one set of footprints leading towards the corpse?

As well as being among Britain’s best current crime writers, Fowler also carries the torch passed on by the great English humourists. With his gentle, quirky but needle sharp observations of the sheer daftness of the way we live now, he links hands with such writers as George and Weedon Grossmith, JB ‘Beachcomber’ Morton, John Betjeman, Israel Zangwill and Colin Watson.

Behind the gags, the knowing cultural references, the ingenious plotting and the clever characterisations, we have Fowler’s unique take on London itself. No living writer save, perhaps, in their different ways, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, knows London quite like Christopher Fowler. In other books in the series he has turned his expert eye on the theatres, the city’s lost rivers, and its medieval legends. The star of the show in Strange Tide is the River Thames itself. The crime is eventually solved, Arthur’s malaise is mostly cured, but the powerful river remains the city’s lifeblood. In a telling paragraph, Fowler reveals the deep, dark, blue centre of what he is about.

“…the metropolis is ultimately changeless. Its people remain the same because London is a state of mind. They do not make London. London makes them.”

Strange Tide is published by Doubleday.

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December 31, 2016 0

BOOKS OF THE YEAR … part two

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My first three selections were in the Best Dialogue, Best Historical Novel and best Psychological Thriller categories, and you can review those by clicking this link. Here are my next three ‘best of’ choices.

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BEST NON-UK NOVEL

Murder In Mt Martha by Janice Simpson
There was certainly some red hot competition in this category, particularly from such American superstars as Harlan Coben and Walter Mosley, but there was something about this book that struck a chord. I’ll own up to being a fan of most things Australian, having lived and worked in The Lucky Country, but this story had something rather special.

On the one hand we have the murder itself, based on a real-life crime in the 1950s which remains unsolved to this day. It is true mystery in the sense of both words, but in the book we pretty much know who the killer is quite early in the piece. Simpson treads the tightrope of telling a story through different eyes and times, and she performs like a seasoned veteran, never once coming close to losing her balance. The modern day narrative involves a young Melbourne post graduate student, Nick Szabo, transcribing the memories of the elderly Arthur Boyle.

The past times take us back to the 1950s, both in Melbourne and then further north in rural Queensland. We enter the home of the young Arthur Boyle, who is looked after by his adult sister. Also resident in the Melbourne home is Ern Kavanagh, a twenty-something young man who has ambitions to be something other than a car mechanic. He then leaves Victoria and travels north, in search of fortune, if not fame in Queensland.

One of the great qualities of this book is the way Simpson plays a game with us about the exact relationships between Arthur, Ern and ‘Sissy’. We think we know what’s what, but it becomes clear as the story unfolds that we most certainly do not. There is, if you will, a two part harmony here, because Simpson then introduces another ‘tune’ which involves the history of the Szabo family, refugees from the Hungarian uprising, and once again, as the two melodies complement each other, family secrets unfold like a timelapse video of a flower opening.

The ghost of the murdered girl, clubbed to death and brutalised in a seaside resort near Melbourne, never quite goes away, and the sheer pity and wasteful nature of her death winds like a deep purple thread of mourning through the fabric of the story. The details of ordinary life in the 1950s are compelling and are given with a sense of wistfulness which never descends into mawkish sentiment. The conclusion of the book is brilliant, and the story comes to an end in a way which I least expected, but is entirely fitting and in keeping with the tone of the narrative. Murder In Mt Martha is published by Hybrid Publishers.

police-procedural

BEST POLICE PROCEDURAL

Death Ship by Jim Kelly
Odd couples are many and varied in the world of crime fiction, and many authors have explored the Yin & Yang possibilities that open up. There are many critical appraisals of the device, such as this one from Early Bird Books. I have chosen a beautifully mis-matched duo who are perfect foils for each other. They are Detective Inspector Peter Shaw and Sergeant George Valentine of Norfolk Constabulary, based in King’s Lynn.

Shaw is the younger of the two. In fact, so much so that Valentine actually served on the force with Shaw’s late father. Shaw is a physical fitness enthusiast, a cerebral deep thinker, and is married to an exotic wife whose family is of Caribbean origin. George Valentine is a widower, a suicidally heavy smoker, curmudgeonly but with a razor sharp eye for detail. Together, they have appeared in Jim Kelly’s ‘Death’ series, the previous novels being Death Wore White, Death Watch, Death Toll, Death’s Door and At Death’s Window.

In Death Ship, as with all the previous books, the sea is never far away. The seaside town of Hunstanton has been literally rocked by an explosion on its crowded beach. Something buried deep beneath the sand is triggered by some boys determined to dig a sink-hole sized pit before the tide sweeps in. There is a brief moment when something metallic and shiny appears in the wall of their excavation, but then hell is unleashed. Miraculously, no-one is seriously hurt, but the beach is closed to holidaymakers while forensic experts and a bomb disposal team from the army do their stuff.

But the sea holds other mysteries. In the terrible storm of January 31st 1953, a tempest that battered the East Anglian coast and claimed over 300 lives, a dilapidated Dutch coaster, the Coralia, went down, taking its captain and crew with her. With this in mind, Shaw’s investigations are further complicated by the discovery of a dead diver, tethered to the underwater remains of Hunstanton’s Victorian Pier, destroyed by storms in 1978. Eventually, he learns that the murdered diver is the son of one of the crew members of another wrecked ship, the ill-fated Lagan, whose remains are rotting on the seabed a couple of miles distant from the pleasure beach.

Shaw and Valentine eventually pull the different threads of the mysteries together, with a combination of good solid police work and a touch of vision – the classic combination of perspiration and inspiration. All fine novels offer something extra, however, and as in all Jim Kelly’s novels, there is a deep rooted awareness of the past and the long shadows it can cast over the present. In Death Ship the past is like a sunken ship that has lain undisturbed on the sea bed for decades. Then, with a freak tide, or maybe some seismic shift, the ship’s blackened timbers surface once again, breaking through the surface of the present. There can be few novels where the metaphor is more apt. Death Ship is published by Severn House.

private-eyes

BEST PI NOVEL

A Time of Torment by John Connolly
It is safe to say that Irish author John Connolly has taken the PI genre out of its care home for elderly gentlefolk, given it a good scrub down, bought it a new suit of clothes, given it a good slap and generally breathed new life into it. The beneficiary of this rejuvenation? A haunted (literally) and violent investigator from Portland Maine by the name of Charlie Parker.

Parker’s ghosts are those of his wife and daughter, brutally and shockingly murdered years ago by men whose physical presence was all too temporal, but men whose puppet strings were being pulled by evil forces not entirely of this world. In this novel, Parker is contacted by a former public hero who went from hero to zero when child pornography was found on his computer. Jerome Burnel was given a long jail sentence and suffered the usual fate at the hands of other prisoners for whom sex crimes against children are worse than murder.

Moved by the man’s brutal jail-time story, Parker tries to reassure him that he can rebuild his life. Bernel disappears, however, and his conviction that his days are numbered becomes sadly prescient. Parker and his two New York associates, Louis and Angel, track down Burnel’s chief prison tormentor, Harpur Griffin, also now a free man. Griffin is found in a bar with two companions who register off the scale on Parker’s danger meter. When Griffin is found burned alive in his car shortly after the meeting, Parker, Louis and Angel realise that they are dealing with men who are fueled with something more potent than simple criminality.

Eventually, Parker narrows down his search for Burnel’s tormentors, and his investigations lead him to an isolated – and incestuous – community in Plassey County, West Virginia. The people and their village are known as The Cut, and they have lived in Amish-like seclusion for as long as anyone can recall. The comparison with the Amish begins and ends with reclusiveness, as the god of The Cut isn’t the one found in The Bible. Their god is called The Dead King.

Parker and the people of The Cut circle each other relatively cautiously in the fashion of partners in a courtly dance, but when they do engage, the last 50 pages of the book are violent and remorseless. This is dry mouth time – superb entertainment, but very unsettling too. A Time of Torment is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

December 30, 2016 0