Meiron Trow (left) and I attended the same school in Warwick, but he was a few years behind me, so it would be a lie to say we were school chums. We both went on to spend our working lives as teachers, and I share his endless cynicism about school leadership – and his boundless optimism about the decency of most of the youngsters who we taught.
Peter Maxwell, a history teacher on the south coast of England, is something of a Trow self portrait. The series began in 1994 with Maxwell’s House and now, ‘Mad’ Max returns. I am not a huge fan of modern so-called ‘cosy’ crime. Murder is abhorrent and a blight on society. Surrounding it with the cotton wool of village gossips, eccentric squires, glowing Cotswold limestone villages and inquisitive old ladies might have worked in the 1930s but for me, at least, it doesn’t work now.
What lifts the Mad Max novels is Trow’s deep sense of actual English history – and the humour. His pushbike is nicknamed White Surrey after Richard III’s charger; his son is Nolan, named after the ill-fated officer at The Charge of The Light Brigade. And then we have the throwaway cultural references. Admittedly, these will only work with readers of a certain age, but references to John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, Are You Being Served? and lines from ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ did make me smile.
After giving what he thought was an uncontroversial talk to a local history group, Maxwell is told that he has been reported to the local police and accused of a hate crime. New readers will soon be aware that Maxwell’s wife is a police officer. His first wife died in a car accident and he has married Jacquie relatively late in (his) life.
The hate crime accusations seems just the work of a crank, but then there is an explosion in a house in town, and a body is found in the wreckage. The connection? The destroyed house was No. 38 – the same as Maxwell’s home in another part of town. Thanks to that bosom friend of both police officers and crime novelists, deoxyribonucleic acid, the charred corpse from No. 38 gets a name or, to be more accurate, several names. David Vaughan, Drake Parker, Donald Parker, Drake Parkour, take your pick, was, as they say, known to the police. He was also known to a young woman called Meriel, the teaching assistant in the Science Department at Maxwell’s school. They had been together in the audience at Maxwell’s history talk.
Unusually for the series, it is not Maxwell’s detective brain that solves the crime here, but more a mixture of happenstance and downright stupidity on behalf of the criminals. Readers who want to read more by this very prolific author might like to check out his other series, such as his Margaret Murray mysteries, or the Grand & Batchelor thrillers. He has also written non-fiction books about infamous crimes such as the Whitechapel murders and the Meon Hill murder of 1947.
Maxwell’s Enigma is witty, deftly written and thoroughly English. It is published by Joffe Books and is available now.
You might guess that a crime novel featuring an amateur detective called Gawaine St Clair is not going to take you down many mean streets; furthermore, were one to Frenchify its chromatic tint, then it would probably be nearer beige than noir. This being said, if you are a Golden Age fan, like dry humour, enjoy a clue-laden whodunnit and are never happier than when luxuriating in the follies and foibles of the English middle classes, then Cherith Baldry’s Dangerous Deceits will be a joy.
Gawaine may be too arch and precious for some tastes but he fits perfectly into the Home Counties landscape with its manicured village greens and faux Tudor dwellings. I thoroughly enjoyed Dangerous Deceits and Father Tom’s killer is unmasked not amid the dusty shelves of a country house library, but in the altogether more fractious atmosphere of an extraordinary (in the procedural sense) meeting of the Ellingwood PCC. The solution, as in many a whodunnit, rests with everyone – including Gawaine, the local coppers and, in this particular case, me – making a seemingly obvious assumption early in the piece.
Lock 13 features Chris Honeysett, a private detective whose cases I had never read before, despite this being the sixth in what is clearly a popular series. The previous episodes are Headcase (2005), Slim Chance (2006) Rainstone Fall (2008) An Inch of Time (2012) Worthless Remains (2013) and Indelible (2014). Honeysett, like his creator Peter Helton (more on Helton’s website 
Sometimes a novel is so delightfully written that a reader can reach the last page with a smile and sense of contentment, despite the fact that nothing very dramatic or shocking, at least by the standards of some modern thrillers, has happened during the 200 pages or so which have made up the narrative. Lock 13 is one such book. Peter Helton (right) tells the story through the eyes of Chris Honeysett, and the style is fluent, conversational, occasionally erudite, often witty – but always very, very, readable. Established fans of the Honeysett series can feel duly smug that the amiable painter-sleuth has found another convert, and they can rest assured that I shall be working my way through the file of Honeysett’s previous cases. Lock 13 is published by 
I do love Operas, though – at least those written up to the death of Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (who would be just as wonderful even if he didn’t have six christian names.) I would add the personal caveat that for me it is sometimes better heard than seen, as stage productions can sometimes demand too much suspension of disbelief. Our chosen book, then, is Spur Of The Moment by David Linzee, and it is set around the St Louis Opera company as they prepare a performance of Bizet’s wonderful, preposterous, exhilarating four-act classic, Carmen.
David Linzee has himself been a ‘supernumary’ – basically the opera equivalent of a spear carrier – and he enjoys several digs at the way an opera company in a mid-sized city is run. I particularly enjoyed his jibes at the ubiquitous need for sponsorship. Linzee (right) explains that the SLO has to make sure that literally every brick in the building has corporate support. Thus we have the Peter J Calvocoressi Administration Building, the Charles Macnamara III Auditorium and – best of all – the Endeavour Rent-a-Car Endowed Artist. In this case it’s Amy Song, the woman playing Carmen.
Some historical crime fiction takes us back to times way, way before our own memories could have any validity. Then there are stories set in periods that many of us could reasonably have experienced at first hand. With the former, it is simply the author’s research versus the depth – or lack of – our own historical knowledge. The latter is a much more tricky enterprise, as someone who sets their book in the 1960s, for example, can be exposed to a more searching light – that of readers who actually lived through the years in question.
fullybooked2017 