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THE TORMENTS . . . Between the covers

Annie Jackson, to whom we were introduced in The Murmurs (2023), has a frightening gift – she can foretell how people are going to die. She can also visualise the locations of dead bodies. One of the manifestations of her powers is also a curse. When she is inside her tiny cottage beside a Scottish locj, she hears constant murmuring voices. When she steps outside, however, these voices can be screams, or unintelligible chants. Annie has learned that this strange condition has affected women in her family going back generations.

Annie already has a certain amount of public exposure thanks to a recent case, but she is reluctantly accepted in the village near her cottage. She makes ends meet by waitressing in a cafe, and it is here, one afternoon, when the local lifeboat crew are in for their strong tea and bacon rolls that she has one of her moments of premonition. A junior member of the crew, a lad called Lachlan, drives a car that is something of an ‘old banger’. Annie sees it wrapped round a tree, with the boy dead at the wheel. She says nothing direct by way of a warning, and when her vision turns into horrific reality, she becomes a pariah.

A member of Annie’s wider family turns to her for help. Her son Damien, a former footballer whose career was curtailed by injury, has gone missing, and she asks Annie to try to find him. Reluctantly, Annie agrees, and with the help of her twin brother Lewis, she takes on the case.

There is a parallel plot which begins in the mid 1960s, but we know it will converge with Annie’s present day travails. Two youngsters, Sylvia and Ben, are pupils at a prestigious boarding school, and they fall under the malign influence of Phineas Dance, a sadistic teacher who is also an acoylite of Satanism. Also lurking in the present day background is a sinister spectre known as the Baobhan Sith*.

*The Baobhan Sith is a female fairy in the folklore of the Scottish Highlands, though they also share certain characteristics in common with the succubus. They appear as beautiful women who seduce their victims before attacking them and killing them

As Annie and Lewis chip away at the mystery surrounding Damien’s disappearance their path crosses that of Craig Oldfield, the son of a wealthy and well-connected solicitor. Craig was a one-time friend of Damien, but is his claim that he has no idea of his former friend’s whereabouts to be trusted? We meet a a local police officer, Clare Corrigan who is initially sceptical of Annie’s special powers, and a retired academic called Dr Thomasina Hetherington, who most certainly is not. When Annie goes missing, the story heads for a dramatic conclusion in a cliff-side cave, rumoured to have once been the haunt of the legendary cannibal Sawney Bean. By now, the present day identities of Sylvia and Ben have become clear. The finale put me in mind of the glory days of my youth, reading the the sadly long forgotten novels of Dennis Wheatley such as The Devil Rides Out (1934) in which the Duke de Richleau and his friends Simon Aron, Richard Eaton and Rex Van Ryn battled Satanic forces.

Novels that mix the paranormal with the more familiar tropes of crime fiction are more common than you might think. In the Aector McAvoy novels by David Mark it is McAvoy’s wife who has the sixth sense, and James Oswald’s DI Tony McLean often has worrying premonitions and glimpses into the ‘other world’. I once asked Phil Rickman if his wonderful diocesan exorcist Rev. Merrily Watkins always believes the people with troubled souls who reach out to her for help. His reply was along the lines of. “Not necessarily, but she believes that they believe.”

The Torments is a seriously entertaining story guaranteed to thrill even readers who – like Shakespeare’s Horatio – are initially sceptical about the existence of dark forces. It is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

September 17, 2024 0

THEM WITHOUT PAIN . . . Between the covers

Leeds. The early early summer of 1825. Simon Westow is a Thief-taker, a man who recovers stolen goods for a percentage of their value. He has no legal powers except his own knowledge of the city and a keen intelligence. When he encounters criminals, it is up to the city Constable and the magistrates to apply the law. Followers of this series will be familiar with the dramatis personnae, but for new readers, we have:

Simon Westow, Thief-taker
Rosie, his wife
Richard and Amos, their twin sons
Jane Truscott, former assistant to Westow. Very streetwise and deadly with a knife
Catherine Shields, an elderly widow who has provided Jane with a home
Sally – another child of the streets, and Jane’s replacement

Westow is summoned to the house of Sir Robert Foley, a wealthy man whose man-servant has absconded with two valuable silver cups. Foley wants them returned. When the manservant, Thomas Kendall, is found murdered in a secret room of an old city property just about to be demolished, Westow is told, by a Mr Armistead, that the room was once the workshop of Arthur Mangey, a silversmith, who was executed over a century earlier for the crime of Coin Clipping – snipping the edges off silver coins and then re-using the silver.

When Armistead himself is found murdered, Westow finds himself chasing shadows, and unable to make the connection between the ancient misdeeds of Arthur Mangey and persons unknown who are deeply involved in all-too-recent criminality. There is a seemingly unconnected story line in the book, but old Nickson hands know that it will, eventually, merge with the main plot. A disabled Waterloo veteran, Dobson, has gained a mysterious companion known only as John, but when brutalised corpses begin to appear, John becomes the prime suspect. The corpses have been flayed and brutalised almost beyond recognition. Westow, still doggedly determined to find the missing silver cups is increasingly reliant on the quicksilver street-smarts of Sally, and the old head on young shoulders of Jane, who had hoped for a life away from the streets, but has been drawn back into the dangerous game by her determination to avenge the death of Armistead.

A recurrent theme of Nickson’s Leeds novels, both in these Simon Westow tales, and the Tom Harper stories, set eight decades later, is that of the search. Both Westow and Harper frequently become involved in a search for a key suspect, often someone from ‘out of town’. It is a very simple literary device, but a very effective one, as it provides a platform for Nickson to use his unrivalled knowledge of the city as it once was, its highways, byways, grand houses and insanitary tenements. As we follow Weston’s search for a ruthless killer, the modern streets of Leeds that many readers know are stripped away to reveal the palimpsest of the buildings that once stood there and the people who inhabited them.

Another essential feature of the books is that his heroes don’t inhabit a timeless world, where they are perpetually in their early thirties, strong and vigorous. Tom Harper aged as the series went on, but he was allowed a comfortable old age and peaceful death. Here, Simon Westow is shaken by the recognition that, like Tennyson Ulysses, the years have taken their toll:

“ Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

He is aware that his reflexes are slower, the antennae that once sensed danger and threat are less sensitive, and he is ever more conscious of his own mortality, and his need of people like Sally and Jane to watch his back.

The novel boils down to three pursuits. Simon Westow hunts the man who stole Sir Robert’s cups, Sally wants her knife deep inside the man, known only as John, who murdered her fellow urchin Harold, while Jane vows to kill the man who killed the amiable and blameless Armistead.

Chris Nickson never sugar-coats history, and makes us well aware that modern Leeds, with its universities, its international sporting venues and museums, was built on the blood sweat and tears of millions of ordinary people who grew up, toiled, loved lived and died under the smoky pall of its foundry furnaces, and had the deafening percussion of industrial hammers forever ringing in their ears. Jane, Sally and Simon-at a cost-each get their man in this excellent historical thriller, which is published by Severn House and is available now. For reviews of previous Simon Westow stories, click the author image on the left.

September 16, 2024 0

HOLMES AND MORIARTY . . . Between the covers

No fictional character has been so imitated, transposed to another century, Steampunked, turned into an American, or subject to pastiche than Sherlock Holmes. In my late teens I became aware of a series of stories by Adrian Conan Doyle (the author’s youngest son) and I thought they were rather good. Back then, I was completely unaware that the Sherlock Holmes ‘industry’ was running even while new canonical stories were still being published in the 1890s. Few of them survive inspection, and I have to say I am a Holmes purist. I watched one episode of Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘Sherlock’, and then it was dead to me. As for Robert Downey Jr, don’t (as they say)”get me started.” For me, the film/TV apotheosis was Jeremy Brett, but I have a warm place in my heart for the 1950s radio versions starring Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley.

How, then, how does this latest manifestation of The Great Man hold up? The narrative has a pleasing symmetry. The good Doctor is, as ever, the storyteller, but as the book title suggests there is another element. Alternate chapters are seen through the eyes of a man called Moran who is, if you like, Moriarty’s Watson. Gareth Rubin’s Watson is pretty much the standard loyal friend, stalwart and brave, if slightly slow on the uptake. Moran’s voice is suitably different, peppered with criminal slang and much more racy.

The case that draws Holmes into action is rather like The Red Headed League, in that a seemingly odd but ostensibly harmless occurrence (a red haired man being employed to copy out pages of an encyclopaedia) is actually cover for something far more sinister. In this case, a young actor has been hired to play Richard III in a touring production. He comes to Holmes because he is convinced that the small audiences attending each production are actually the same people each night, but disguised differently each time.

Meanwhile, Moriarty has become involved in a turf war involving rival gangsters, and there is an impressive body count, mostly due to the use of a terrifying new invention, the Maxim Gun. There is so much going on, in terms of plot strands, that I would be here all week trying to explain but, cutting to the chase, our two mortal enemies are drawn together after a formal opening of an exhibition at The British Museum goes spectacularly wrong when two principal guests are killed by a biblical plague of peucetia viridans. Google it or, if you are an arachnophobe, best give it a miss.

Long story short, three of the men who led the archaeological dig that produced the exhibits for the aborted exhibition at the BM are now dead, killed in some sort of international conspiracy. It is worth reminding readers that as the 19thC rolled into the 20thC, the pot that eventually boiled over in 1914 was already simmering. Serbian nationalism, German territorial ambitions, the ailing empires of the Ottomans and Austria Hungary, and the gathering crisis in Russia all made for a toxic mix. This novel is not what I would call serious historical fiction. It is more of a melodramatic – and very entertaining – romp, and none the worse for that, but Gareth Rubin makes us aware of the real-life dangerous times inhabited by his imaginary characters.

Eventually Holmes, Watson, Moriarty and Moran head for Switzerland as uneasy allies, for it is in these mountains that the peril lurks, the conspiracy of powerful men that threatens to change the face of Europe. They fetch up in Grenden, a strange village in the shadow of the Jungfrau and it is here, in a remarkably palatial hotel given the location, they are sure they have come to the place from which the plot will be launched. By this stage the novel has taken a distinctly Indiana Jones turn, with secret passages, and deadly traps (again involving spiders).

This is great fun, with all the erudition one would expect from The Great Consulting Detective and with a rip-roaring adventure thrown in for good measure. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and will be available at the end of September.

September 11, 2024 0

A VIOLENT HEART . . . Between the covers

David Fennell introduced us to London copper DI Grace Archer in The Art of Death (2021) Now, she returns in a complex new case which involves cold case crime and the murders of sex workers, decades apart. The investigation becomes very here-and-now when the body of a young Croatian woman called Elena Zoric is found. She died from a puncture wound to her chest, but whatever killed her, it wasn’t a bullet.

The best police procedurals always give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the personalities and tensions that exist inside a police station. Because her previous superior has been sideline and has to care for her husband, struck down with Long Covid, Grace Archer has a new boss, Chief Inspector Les Fletcher, He is described as a “gammon-faced Yorkshireman” with more than a trace of the toxic masculinity common to that breed. Archer’s wing man is Belfast born DS Harry Quinn – reliable and intuitive. Less helpful is DI Lee Parry, nephew of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. He is lazy, venal and prepared to cut corners for an easy life.

I have often observed that Detective Inspectors in British crime novels are, perhaps, overused. There are very sound reasons for this, however. DIs are perfectly placed to be both at the centre of investigations bureaucratically, while able to be out on the street, at the crime scene, and in the faces of the bad guys. Much more rare is the novel where a humble DC is the locus of activity. I can think of only one series, and that was written by Alison Bruce, and featured Cambridge Detective Constable Gary Goodhew. My review of The Silence is here. That being said DI Grace Archer is a welcome guest at a party held in a very crowded room.

We have here something of a whirling dervish of a plot, which spins this way and that and incorporates apparently disconnected events. We have a bizarre (but sadly all-too-credible) social ‘influencer’ called Calvin ‘Dixy’ Dixon whose latest Tik-Tok sensation shows him talking to the dessicated corpse of a woman sitting in a wheelchair in an abandoned house. There is also something that might become a ‘love interest’ angle, when Liam, a builder friend of Harry Quinn, is booked to renovate Archer’s house. He also happens to be extremely handsome, and brings with him freshly baked croissants to share before he starts work each day.

Then there is Mallory Jones, the guiding light in a successful podcast called Mallory Jones Investigates. She alternately helps and hinders Archer’s search for a man whose weapon of choice appears to be some kind of bolt gun. Finally, in far-off Berwick on Tweed, we have the Mercer family. Barry and Isla, and Isla’s brother Simon. Barry and Isla are both ex-coppers, but their teenage daughter Lily has fallen in with a bad crowd, and makes fistfuls of cash by appearing in amateur porn videos with her bestie, Gemma.

Archer is concerned to discover that, back in the day, her new boss Les Fletcher was, as a young PC, involved in the older murder investigations, and her informants tell her that he was rude and unsympathetic, strongly showing his prejudice that as ‘working girls’, getting assaulted by clients just went with the job.

As you might expect, David Fennell seizes the frayed ends of these plot strands and weaves them together to make for a highly satisfying conclusion. There is a savage and sanguinary denouement in, most appropriately, a disused abattoir. Not everyone survives the carnage, but as the emergency vehicles trundle off into the night, we have catharsis. Grace Archer certainly has her own demons to torment her, but she is a courageous and resourceful copper with a fierce determination to pursue the truth. A Violent Heart is published by Zaffre and is available now.

September 5, 2024 1

THE BABY-FACED BUTCHER . . . Death in Leamington (2)

SO FAR: In the early hours of Monday 2nd February 1976, the butchered body of Chinese nurse Tze Yung Tong (left) was found in her room in a nurses’ hostel at 83 Redford Road, Leamington Spa. Other young women had heard noises in the night, but had been too terrified to venture beyond their locked doors. We can talk about ships passing in the night, in the sense of two people meeting once, but never again. Tze Yung Tong was to meet her killer just the one fatal time.

Gerald Michael Reilly was born in Birmingham in 1957, but he and his family moved to Leamington. After primary school, he went to Dormer School, which then had its main building on Myton Road. He was described as quiet and pleasant, but not one of life’s high achievers. In 1974 he had a brief spell in the Merchant Navy before returning to Leamington to live with his parents at 49 Plymouth Place and work as a builders’ labourer. He was engaged to be married to Julie, a young woman from the north of England he had met during his Merchant Navy days.

On the evening of 1st February 1976, he was observing the moral code of the time by sleeping downstairs, while Julie was chastely abed upstairs. At some point, he decided he needed sex. It was never going to happen at home, so he let himself out of the house, and walked the 200 yards or so along snow-covered pavements to the nurses’ hostel on Redford Road. There, he shinned up a drain-pipe, and padded along the corridors hoping for an unlocked door. He found one. It was Tze Yung Tong’s room.

This is where the story goes into “you couldn’t make it up” territory. It was estimated that Reilly spent 90 minutes going about his dreadful work on the young nurse. Then, still clutching the sheath knife with which he had disembowelled Tze Yung Tong, he retraced his steps to Plymouth Place and went back to sleep.Just twelve days later, with hundreds of police banging their heads against a brick wall, Gerald and Julie were married with all the traditional trappings at St Peter’s church on Dormer Place. In those days honeymoons were rather prosaic by modern standards, so the star-crossed lovers set off for the West Country. Julie had her “going away” outfit, but Gerald brought with him something more significant – the knife with which he gutted Tze Yung Tong. In a bizarre attempt at concealment, he hid the blade in a toilet cistern at a Bath hotel.

Below, Gerald and Julie on their wedding day

By this time, whatever passed for logical thought in Reilly’s mind had gone AWOL. Upon returning to Leamington, and hearing about the intense fingerprinting initiative, he decided that the game was up and, with his uncle for company, turned himself in. The irony is that the police, in desperation, had announced that there was one set of prints they had not been able to eliminate. Assuming they were his, Reilly offered his wrists for the handcuffs. The prints were not his.

Despite his palpable guilt, Reilly was endlessly remanded, made numerous appearances before local magistrates, but eventually had brief moment in a higher court. At Birmingham Crown Court in December, Mr Justice Donaldson (right) found him guilty of murder, and sentenced him to life, with a minimum tariff of 20 years.In 1997, a regional newspaper did a retrospective feature on the case. By then, the police admitted that he had already been released. Do the sums. Reilly, the Baby-Faced Butcher may still be out there. He will only be in his late 60s. Ten years younger than me. One of the stranger aspects of this story is that, as far as I can tell, at no time did solicitors and barristers working to defend Reilly ever suggest that his actions were that of someone not in his right mind. By contrast, in an earlier shocking Leamington case in 1949, The Sten Gun Killer (click the link to read it) the ‘insanity card’ was played with great success. Perhaps must face the fact that sometimes, sheer evil can exist in human beings who are perfectly sane and rational.

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September 3, 2024 0

I DIED AT FALLOW HALL . . . Between the covers

Although set in a beautiful village near Cirencester, with glowing limestone cottages, a jolly white-haired vicar, and the squire’s mansion up on its hill, this is as far away from a ‘Midsomer’ type Cosy Crime as you can get. Instead it is a beautifully written tale, full of poetry, some very dark corners and people who, if not severely damaged, are fighting their own demons. Anna Deerin, a former ballerina who had to quit through ligament damage has moved to the village of Upper Magna. She lives in a grace and favour cottage in the grounds of Fallow Hall. She lives rent free because she has undertaken to work and restore what was once the Hall’s extensive kitchen garden. She keeps chickens and earns a slender living by baking cakes and selling them – and her fruit and vegetables – at the weekly farmers’ market on the village green.

She lives in a kind of self-imposed exile, with no mobile phone and no current close friends. This all changes when, while attacking a long neglected part of the garden with a pick-axe, she finds human remains. Into her life comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, another London exile. He heads up the search for the identity of the skeleton – subsequently proved to be that of a woman. Like Anna, he is a complex individual. He is deeply immersed, emotionally, in a well of sadness caused by the recent death of his mother. While he respects his elderly father, the way that his mother was treated rankles with him. Although it seems nothing unusual in Indian families, he resents the fact that his mother was just seen as a cook, child-bearer and housemaid, while her obvious intellectual and emotional talents (she was a part-time hospital administrator) seemed to count for nothing in the family home. He has little left of her now, except the fragrance of her skin and cooking – and a treasured red cardigan which he describes, chillingly, as ‘empty’.

Bonnie Burke-Patel (left) intersperses contemporary events with brief but telling episodes from 1967. We meet a young woman, living locally (almost certainly in Fallow Hall) She has a younger brother, away at university. Her mother is rather inadequate, particularly at household skills, and her father is a domineering and demanding WW2 veteran, hideously disfigured by a facial injury. One morning, she escapes into Cirencester (to buy the ingredients for her own birthday cake) and meets a young Canadian man. There is an instant attraction and, after very little courtship she, belatedly – in the time-honoured phrase – loses her virginity.

This sets up the puzzle to perfection, but the author plays her cards very close to her chest. Mid way through the book there are so many questions. Is the authoritarian father related to Lord Blackwaite, the current Lord of the Manor? Is the body in the garden his daughter? Who tried to batter their way in to Anna’s cottage a couple of nights after she uncovered the remains?

Reviewing crime novels is not particularly difficult when the books are thrillers, police procedurals or basic whodunnits. The reviewer has a few simple tasks: outline the plot, describe the characters and setting, and then describe how well the book works. I am neither a professional writer nor a journalist, and so I tend to read books that I know I will be happy with. Just occasionally, there comes a book which challenges my ability to do it justice. I Died at Fallow Hall is one such.

As I said earlier, despite the familiar rural tropes, this is something rather special. The startling violence near the end, and the emotional intensity with which Anna empathises with – and is determined to identify – the girl whose skull she cradled in her hands on that fateful autumn afternoon, sets this novel aside as something very special. Putting on my reviewer’s hat I can answer the potential readers’ question, “What do I get.” In no particular order you get a murder mystery, a grim account of the cruelties that family members can inflict on each other, a poignant study of loneliness and isolation, a gimlet-eyed look at English class structure and, above all, a testimony to the power of love. From Bedford Square Publishers, this is available now.

September 2, 2024 1

THE BABY-FACED BUTCHER . . . Death in Leamington (1)

In the early hours of 2nd February 1976, an act of almost inhuman barbarity occurred in a rather grand Regency house on Radford Road, Leamington Spa. The house, number 83, was used as an annexe providing accommodation for nurses who worked at the nearby Warneford hospital. One such was 23 year old Tze Yung Tong. What were the circumstances that led her to be in Leamington? Misjudgment, or an act of cruelty by Fate?

Thomas Hardy ends what is, for me, his most powerful tragedy by commenting on the death by hanging of his heroine, Tess Durbeyfield. He says, “’Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.” He refers to the Greek dramatist who imagined humans as mere playthings of the Gods, moved around like chess pieces for their entertainment. If you accept this concept is valid, then the Gods certainly played a very cruel trick on Tze Yung Tong.

It could be said that misfortune had played a part in putting the young Chinese woman in that particular place at that particular time. Trained as a nurse, she had married a travel courier in Hong Kong in 1973, and the couple had moved to Taiwan. The marriage did not last, however, and Tze, pregnant, moved back to her parents’ house in Hong Kong. When her son, Yat Chung Lam, was born, she made the fateful decision to move to England where the pay was much better, reasoning that she could send sufficient money home to better provide for the boy’s upbringing. The picture below shows Tze with her son in happier times.

On the morning of 2nd February Tze’s body was found in her room. The subsequent autopsy found that she had been stabbed multiple times in what must have been a frenzied assault. She had also been raped. At the murderer’s trial, the prosecution barrister told the jury:

“Two police officers came and were greeted with a horrible sight. Blood was everywhere, even splattered on the walls. Among evidence found by detectives were footprints on the roof leading to the landing window, and fingerprints on the landing windowsill, and on the outside of nurse Tong’s door. The pathologist examined the ghastly scene. Firstly there was a superficial cut on the nurse’s neck and it is considered the deceased was held at knife-point prior to her throat being cut. Also her clothes had been taken off after her throat had been cut. The pathologist also found she had laying on the bed completely passively in part because of loss of blood and partly through fear.”

Below – the house where Tze was murdered, as pictured in a 1976 newspaper and how it is today.

In researching these murder stories, I often wonder about the metaphor of a random rolling of the dice that puts two people on a collision course. More often than not, murders are committed by someone known to the victim, often a family member, but was this the case here? It also proved to be a case where the police, despite a huge allocation of manpower and resources, literally had no clue as to the identity of Tze’s killer, and it was only a loss of nerve on his part that resulted in his arrest and trial.Tze had finished her shift at the Warneford at around 9.00pm on 1st February and had walked back along the snow covered pavement to the nurses’ hostel. Again, fate intervened. The girls had been warned repeatedly to make sure their room doors were locked before they went to bed. Tze’s keys were found hanging on a hook on the side of her wardrobe.

Tze’s ravaged body was eventually released to her family, in this case her mother Kit Yu Chen who had flown in from Hong Kong, and one of her sisters – Patricia Tze Min Fung – who had travelled from Canada. Whatever secrets the girl’s remains held were consumed by the flames at Oakley Wood crematorium on 26th February. Her relatives did not stay for the funeral.

The police threw everything they had into the investigation but in a way, it was doomed from the start. There was no jealous boyfriend. Tze, with what might be called her ‘real life’ 6000 miles away in Hong Kong, was pleasant and polite, but had shown no desire to establish a social life in England. The Warneford was just somewhere where she could advance her midwifery skills before going home and use her qualifications to provide a better life for herself and her son. The police clutched at straws. Who was the well-spoken mystery man she had shared a meal with at a recent course in Stratford on Avon? Could local tailors shed any light on a pair of trousers found near the murder scene? Would the mass fingerprinting of thousands of Leamington men shed any light on the mystery?

Ironically, it was the latter scheme which would produce a result, but not in the way police imagined.

IN PART 2
A wedding
A honeymoon
A confession

September 2, 2024 2

THE DARK WIVES . . . Between the covers

Readers who have also watched the successful TV series dramatising the Vera Stanhope novels will have their own views on how Brenda Blethyn’s Detective Inspector matches up to the woman on the printed page. I stopped watching TV versions of police procedurals years ago, with the demise of John Thaw, so my take is purely based on the book. Vera Stanhope is a dowdy, frumpish woman in her 50s, lonely and probably a social misfit. Brought up by an eccentric father, Hector, in a moorland cottage in Northumbria, denied (by premature death) a mother’s love, she is a formidably intelligent detective. She drives a battered Land Rover, has holes in her socks, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Here, she is handed a complex case that has splintered into myriad issues. At its heart is the apparently motiveless murder, by hammer attack, of an undergraduate and part time social worker, Josh Woodburn. A teenage girl, Chloe Spence, who was a reluctant resident at Rosebank, where Josh worked shifts, has gone missing. Where is she, and why was film and media enthusiast Josh, unbeknown to his family, moonlighting with shifts at a children’s home?

Vera has the death of one of her team, a Detective Constable called Holly, on her conscience, but she takes a maternal interest in Holly’s replacement, Rosie Bell, a rather glamorous and fashion conscious young woman who is actually a very good copper. When another inmate of Rosebank, a young chancer called Bradley Russell is found dead in a remote hillside bothy, the case becomes more complex.Without, I hope, giving too much away, Vera’s hunch is that Josh Woodburn’s death is connected with what he was really doing at Rosebank. Josh was a decent, caring young man, and very good with the children, but that wasn’t the main reason he was there. When Vera, with the help of fellow officer Charlie, joins the dots, the picture also explains why Brad also had to die.

Both the season and the mood of the book are distinctly autumnal. Vera’s work is her life, and there seems to be little outside the job. The depressing world of broken homes, absent fathers, and a society where children’s homes are run by shadowy corporations on a distinctly for profit basis does not improve Vera’s downbeat view of the world but, to borrow a line from Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis, “The light we sought is shining still.”, and in Vera’s case the faint glimmer is provided by bringing justice to the dead. She couldn’t be more different from Derek Raymond’s nameless detective in the Factory Novels (click for more information) but they have the same fierce resolve.

If years of reading police-procedural crime novels has taught me anything, it is that well-balanced, happily married Detectives are not fun. Vera Stanhope is forever on the edge of things, caught up in her own personal history and sense of regret, reluctantly wearing a halo of missed opportunities and ‘what ifs’.. Her fierce empathy with those society has cast aside, combined with her innate shrewdness and ability to pick out a ‘wrong-un’ make her one of the genre’s most treasured creations.

The Dark Wives of the title are three stone monoliths on the fellside near Vera’s home. Legend has it that they were three strong willed women who were turned to stone by husbands fed up with their feistiness. In the preface, Anne Cleeves writes:
“The book is dedicated to teens everywhere, and especially to The Dark Wives – uppity young women with minds of their own, struggling to find a place in a difficult world.”
The novel is published by Macmillan and was published on 29th August.

September 1, 2024 1

THE LAZAR HOUSE . . . Between the covers

Diane Calton Smith’s medieval mysteries, set in Wisbech, don’t follow a continuous time line. The most recent, Back To The Flood, is set in 1249, while The Lazar House, published in 2022, is set in 1339. The geography of the town is much the same as in The Charter of Oswyth and Leoflede, where the author takes us back to 1190. In this book, most of the town still sits between two very different rivers. To the west, The Wysbeck is a sluggish trickle, easily forded, while to the east, the Well Stream is broader and more prone to violence.

South of the town is the hamlet of Elm (now a prosperous village) and on its soil stands The Lazar House. It is a hospice for those suffering from leprosy. Basically under the governance of the Bishop of Ely it must, however, be self financing. There was a deeply held belief, in those times, in the concepts of Heaven, Hell, and their buffer zone of purgatory. People believed that if they had any spare cash or – more likely – produce, and they gave it to a charity such as The Lazar House, then prayers would be said that would minimise the time donors’ souls had to spend waiting in the celestial ‘waiting room’ of Purgatory.

A rather grand supporter of The Lazar House is Lady Frideswide de Banlon. Widow of a rich knight, she has bestowed on The Lazar House tuns of fine ale from her demesne’s brewery, and it is a vital part of their constant attempts to stay solvent. Remember that ale, of various strengths, was a standard drink for all, as there was little water safe enough to drink.

Sadly, there is a downside. Frideswide is scornful, aggressive and deeply unpleasant in her dealings with those she deems lesser mortals. There is no shortage of people she has belittled, offended or denigrated. Much of the story unfolds through the eyes of Agathe, daughter of a local Reeve. She has chosen to work as what we now call a nurse at The Lazar House. Despite her robes, she has not taken Holy Orders and, should she choose, is perfectly able to accept the offer of marriage, proposed by another lay member of the community, Godwin the Pardoner. Put bluntly, his job is rather like that of a modern politician working with lobbyists. In return for financial favours or donations in kind, he has licence to forgive minor sins and guarantee that prayers of redemption will be whispered on a monthly, weekly – or daily basis – depending on the size of the donation.

When Lady Frideswide is found dead beside the footpath between The Lazar House and the brewery, the Bishop’s Seneschal, Sir John Bosse is sent for and he begins his investigation. His first conclusion is that Frideswide was poisoned, by deadly hemlock being added to flask of ale, found empty and discarded on the nearby river bank. He has the method. Now he must discover means and motive. Bosse is a shrewd investigator, and he realises that Frideswide was not, by nature, a charitable woman, therefore was the valuable gift of ale a penance for a previous sin? Pondering what her crime may have been, he rules out acts of violence, as they would have been dealt with by the authorities. Robbery? Hardly, as the de Banlon family are wealthy. He has what we would call a ‘light-bulb moment’, although that metaphor is hardly appropriate for the 14th century. Frideswide, despite her unpleasant manner, was still extremely beautiful, so Bosse settles for the Seventh Commandment. But with whom did she commit adultery?

When Bosse finds out the identity of her partner ‘between the sheets’, he is surprised, to say the least, but the revelation does not immediately bring him any nearer to finding her killer. The solution to the mystery, in terms of the plot, is very elegant, and worthy of one of the great writers of The Golden Age. It comes as a shock to the community, however, and brings heartbreak to more than one person. Diane Calton Smith draws us into the world of The Lazar House to the extent that when they suffer, so do we. The last few pages are not full of Hardy-esque bitterness and raging against life’s unfairness. Rather, they point more towards the sunlit uplands and, perhaps, better times ahead.

This is as clever a whodunnit as you could wish to read, and an evocative recreation of fourteenth century England. The author brings both the landscape and its people into vivid life. Published by New Generation Publishing The Lazar House is available now.