English Crime Fiction

CITY ON FIRE . . . Between the covers

In all my 76 years, I have never visited Brighton. Nothing personal, but I have never had a reason to go there. As a locus for crime novels it is certainly up there with its not-so-near northern neighbour, London. It probably all started with the evil doings of Charles ‘Pinky’ Hale in Graham Greene’s classic 1938 novel. In more recent times Peter James, with his Roy Grace series, has dispelled any notion that the resort is a happy and cheerful place of innocent fun, handkerchief hats, deck chairs and donkey rides. In a totally different vein, the Colin Crampton novels written by another Peter – this time Bartram – have hinted at a less malevolent Brighton in the 1960s.

Graham Bartlett’s Brighton is simply foul. Drug addicts from all over the country huddle in their rancid blankets in shop doorways. In summer, the warm breezes from the south still entice Londoners to take the trains from Victoria, and the shingle beaches still remain attractive. Walk just a hundred yards or so from the promenade, however, and you come face to face with the unique dangers generated by shattered human lives colliding with the vicious criminals who provide the drugs on which their victims have become reliant.

When Ged, a Liverpudlian undercover cop briefed to penetrate the Brighton drug scene announces that, after this current job, he is looking forward to a spell of paternity leave to welcome his firstborn, it is an obvious ‘tell’. You don’t need to have a PhD in contemporary crime fiction to know that this means he is not long for this world. He gets on the wrong side of Sir Ben Parsons, a Brighton legend, and a man who has worked his way from the metaphorical barrow boy to be CEO of an international pharmaceutical giant. Parsons’ latest money spinner is Synthopate, a drug that replicates the peaceful oblivion of heroin, but has no need of drug cartels, murderous enforcers, and street trash addicts.

Chief Superintendent Jo Howe has a dog in this fight. Her sister Caroline is not long dead, a victim of her opiate addiction. She is spearheading an initiative to get as many addicts as possible off the street , cleaned up, and into rehab. It is working well, but it is the last thing that Parsons wants, as it will hit the sales of Synthopate. Parsons has powerful friends everywhere – in politics, business, the media – and even the police. Together with Brighton crime boss Tony Evans, he starts to target the police officers themselves, and their families. All of a sudden, officers are calling in sick, becoming unavailable for court cases and showing a marked reluctance to volunteer for extra duties. Howe is furious but then it hits her world, too. Her journalist husband Darren is arrested by the Metropolitan Police for alleged corruption, and he looks to be facing serious jail time.

Things get even worse. Service companies employed by Sussex police – court staff, mortuaries, vehicle maintenance – all suddenly become unavailable – and there is a killer blow. Jo Howe’s two young sons go into convulsions after eating their school packed lunches and are on life support. There is a trope which suggests that there is no more dangerous being in creation than a mother when she realises her children’s lives are threatened. So it is here. Jo Howe becomes a blistering force of nature, and in a literally explosive finale she saves her sons, her own career – and ends the malevolent reign of Ben Parsons and Tony Evans.

One of the trademarks of the great film director Roger Corman (and he is still with us, aged 97) was to end his Hammer films with a fire – mansion, castle, cottage, it didn’t matter. Graham Bartlett makes a nod in his direction at the end of this book. Good prevails in the end, but the author paints a picture of a police force and justice system that is just a few malign keystrokes away from dystopia – and we should all be very worried. City On Fire is published by Allison & Busby and is available now.

March 30, 2024 0

THE ANTIQUE HUNTER’S GUIDE TO MURDER . . . Between the covers

Think the beautiful county of Suffolk, with its stately churches and half-timbered villages. Think the timeless Stour and Deben valleys and their rivers, where the sun dapples the glinting water, much as it did when Constable immortalised the scene. Think antiques. Think crime and intrigue. Remind you of Sunday nights back in the day? It reminds me of the antics of Lovejoy and his friends, thirty years ago. However, this is rather different. We are in the present day, and the central character is Freya Lockwood, a skilled antique hunter who has fallen on hard times. Her former husband has let her keep their house until their daughter grew up, but now he wants it back and she is, to paraphrase the great Derek Raymond, rather like the crust on its uppers.

Freya’s background has elements of tragedy. As a schoolgirl, she was badly burned in the house fire that killed her parents, and she was brought up by her aunt Carole and began her working career as an assistant to antiques expert Arthur Crockleford. At some point they had a major falling out, and haven’t spoken in years. When Freya gets a ‘phone call from Carole to say that Arthur has been found dead in his shop, she ups sticks and travels down to Little Meddington where he had his shop.

The police have decided that Arthur’s demise is a simple case of an elderly man falling down the stairs, but then Freya and Carole are handed a letter addressed to them which begins:
“If you are holding this letter in your hands then it is over for me..”

Is there more to Arthur’s death than meets the eye? We know there is, because of the first few pages of the book, but Freya and Carole are in the dark after subsequently being told by a solicitor that the shop and its contents are now theirs. They begin to pick away at the mystery.

Arthur has arranged an antiques weekend to be held, in the event of his death, at Copthorne Manor a nearby minor stately home. He has invited several people connected with the antiques world to stay at the Manor, and it is as if he will be conducting the consequent opera like a maestro from beyond the grave.

We learn that the falling out between Freya and Arthur was a tragedy that occurred in Cairo many years earlier, Arthur and Freya were in Egypt ostensibly verifying and valuing certain items which were thought to have been stolen and were being traded on the antiques black market. Freya fell in love with a with a young Egyptian, Asim, whose family firm specialised in creating very cleverly faked antiquities. When a deal goes wrong, Asim is found dead, and Arthur sends Freya back to England. They have not spoken since, as Freya believes that Arthur was responsible for her lover’s death.

Now, back in Suffolk, at Copthorne Manor, some of the people involved in the Cairo incident are together again under the same roof, and in the vaults of the house are packing crates which contain some of the items which were central to Asim’s murder.

Everyone wants to get their hands on the precious items, but no-one is who they seem to be. The country house setting allows author Cara Miller to run through the full repertoire of Golden Age tropes, including thunderstorms, power cuts and corpses, and she has great fun as Freya and Carole eventually expose the villains.

Cara Miller (above) is the daughter of the late Judith Miller of Antiques Roadshow fame, so she certainly knows her stuff. The novel is a splendid mix of murder, mayhem and outrageous characters, and will delight those who love a good old fashioned mystery, with more than a hint of the Golden Age. It is published by Macmillan, and is available now.

March 17, 2024 0

DEADLY ANIMALS . . . Between the covers

The district of Rubery, on the edge between Birmingham and Worcestershire. 1981. Ava Bonney is thirteen years old, She lives with her mum and sisters in a rudimentary council flat. Her dad has flown the coop, but mum Colleen has a feckless boyfriend, Trevor. Ava is an unusual girl. She is fascinated with animal physiology, and absorbs information mostly from books, but also – on the rare occasions when her fellow pupils are not being disruptive – from science lessons at school.

Ava is startlingly intelligent, but also wise enough to disguise herself as an ordinary teenager when needs must. She has an unusual hobby. She collects roadkill – mostly small mammals – and she takes them to secret sites close to her home, and installs them in little shrines. She secretly visits these special places as the remains decompose, and records her observations in a notebook. The largest specimen she has collected is a fox, but when she sneaks out one night to examine it, she has an unpleasant surprise. The smell of putrefaction is far more pungent than she would have expected, but the reason is obvious. Just a couple of yards from the dead fox is the body of a local schoolboy who went missing a couple of weeks earlier.

Not the least of Ava’s skills is a talent for mimicry, and she disguises her voice as that of a well educated middle-aged woman to make a 999 call, reporting what she has found. Another body is found, and then a third boy disappears. By this time, after interviewing local youngsters who knew the boys, Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye has his suspicions that ‘Miss Misty’, the caller nicknamed after the anonymous woman in the 1971 Clint Eastwood film, is none other than Ava. Given the nature of the wounds inflicted on the boys the police are, despite common sense and experience, coming close to believing that they might be seeking a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who.’

Ava, with the help of her friend John, begins to put together a theory about what might be happening, and she believes that there is a connection to an elderly man – a former farmer and dog breeder – who is languishing in a care home with dementia. Delahaye, meanwhile, is receiving strange and disturbing reports of a large unidentified animal being seen at night in several places. As the police and Ava – in their different ways, close in on the killer, they realise that the truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

In Ava, Marie Tierney has created one of the most startling and original characters in modern crime fiction. I suppose she is a savant, but her gifts are not the result of her being on any kind of autism spectrum. She is super-smart, but also sensitive to the needs and natures of other people.

This is an astonishing novel on so many levels. It combines horror, compassion, dark humour, narrative verve, a deeply embedded empathy with landscape and locale and – above all – Ava Bonney, a truly memorable creation. Deadly Animals is published by Bonnier Books and is available now.

February 25, 2024 0

THE LONGEST GOODBYE . . . Between the covers

This tough and unflinching Tyneside police thriller is the latest outing for Mari Hannah’s DCI Kate Daniels. The Longest Goodbye is the ninth in a series which began in 2012 with The Murder Wall. We are in late December 2022, and in Newcastle, like other cities across Britain, revellers are raising two fingers to the recently discovered Omicron variant of the Coronavirus, and are out in the clubs and pubs wearing – because it is Newcastle, after all – as little as possible, despite the freezing weather. Two lads in particular – homeward bound from overseas, and just off the plane – are determined to have a few beers before being reunited with mum and dad.

However, neither the two bonny lads nor mum and dad quite fit the ‘home for Christmas’ template. Lee and Jackson Bradshaw are only in their twenties, but have already done serious time for violence, and are returning from a European bolthole where they have been hiding from British police. Mum and Dad? Don Bradshaw is a career criminal, but pales into insignificance beside his wife Christine, who is the ruthless boss of the region’s biggest crime syndicate.

When the two prodigal sons are gunned down on the doorstep of their parents’ (recently rented) home just as they are about to sing ‘Silent Night‘, la merde frappe le ventilateur (pardon my French) The police are called and Don Bradshaw, brandishing the handgun dropped by one of his sons, is shot dead by a police marksman. No-one on the staff of Northumbria police will mourn three dead Bradshaws, but for Kate Daniels, the incident opens up a particularly unpleasant can of worms. Three years earlier, her best friend and police colleague Georgina Ioannou was found dead in a patch of woodland. Shot in the back. Executed. And it was the Bradshaw boys who were prime suspects.

Kate is forced to think the unthinkable: that Georgina’s twins, Oscar and Charlotte, now both police officers, were involved; even worse is the thought that Georgina’s husband Nico, although ostensibly a peaceful restaurateur, has avenged his wife’s murder. Revisiting old cases is never easy, and this one is made even worse by the fact that the Senior Investigating Officer at the time, was lazy, incompetent, and all-too-willing to cut corners.

Mari Hannah does not spare our sensibilities. She takes us through the painful process of self-examination one uncomfortable step at a time. It isn’t just Kate Daniels who must own up to past mistakes and errors of judgment, it is the whole Major Incident Team. Meanwhile, although the appalling Christine Bradshaw is safely behind bars facing a murder charge (the Firearms Officer she brained with a baseball bat has since died) like a badly treated tumour, malignant cells remain, and these men, enabled by her corrupt lawyer, are hard at work on the streets and in the pubs, clubs and private homes of Newcastle, determined to prevent the police from discovering the truth.

The Longest Goodbye, with its gentle nod to the Raymond Chandler thriller of almost the same name, grips from the first page, and we are fed the reddest of red herrings, one after the other, until Mari Hannah reveals a murderer who I certainly had not suspected. While few mourn the two dead criminals, when their killer is finally unmasked it is heartbreaking on so many levels. This is superior stuff from one of our finest writers. The Longest Goodbye is published by Orion and was published on 18th January.

January 24, 2024 1

LOST AND NEVER FOUND . . . Between the covers

If the tags “Oxford”, “Murder” and “Detective” have you salivating about the prospect of real ale in ancient pubs, choirs rehearsing madrigals in college chapels, and the sleuth nursing a glass of single malt while he listens to Mozart on his stereo system, then you should look away now. Simon Mason (left) brings us an Oxford that is very real, and very now. The homeless shiver on their cardboard sleeping mats in deserted graveyards, and the most startling contrast is the sight of Range Rovers and high-end Volvos cruising into car washes manned by numerous illegal immigrants from God-knows-where, all controlled by criminals, probably embedded within the Albanian mafia.

Against this background, meet Detective Inspector Ryan Wilkins, and his partner DI Ray Wilkins (no relation to Ryan or the late footballer). Ray is from a wealthy Nigerian family, happily married, photogenic and a rising star in the police hierarchy, while Ryan is – to put it bluntly – what some people might call a Chav. His idea of workwear is silver shell-suit bottoms, baseball cap and knock-off Nike hoodie. He is working hard to revive his career after being suspended. His former girlfriend died of a drug overdose, while his son – Ryan junior, – is largely looked after by Wilkins’s sister.

I missed the first novel in the series, but enjoyed the second, The Broken Afternoon, which I reviewed in December last year. Now the unlikely partners are faced with a new mystery. A formerly wealthy heiress, who has frittered away most of her privilege on drugs and a hedonistic lifestyle, has gone missing. Her Rolls Royce is found abandoned after colliding with the gates of the station car park. The tabloids, who have a huge library of back copy on Zoey Fanshawe, sniff a sensation, and they are not wrong. When Ryan finds her body, brutally strangled in an empty Oxford property owned by her former husband, the world and his wife are leaning on him to find the killer.

The concept underpinning this series is the contrast between Ray and Ryan, and that Ryan – the anarchic slob – is the one with the real detective’s brain. He is also unlucky in love. His current girlfriend, ostensibly a flourishing florist, has a dark past. We meet an officer who seems to be everyone’s favourite copper, the charismatic Assistant Chief Constable, Chester Lynch. There isn’t a contemporary box she doesn’t tick. Female?√ Black?√ Media friendly?√ Wears leather and designer shades?√ So far, her career trajectory has not been impeded by awkward bastards like Ryan Wilkins, who has a habit of asking difficult questions. This is all about to change.

While Ray seems mesmerised by Lynch (who has just offered him a serious promotion) Ryan is immune to the hype, and suspects she is a player in the murky back-story of the late Zoe Fanshawe. The plot of Lost and Never Found is beautifully crafted, and the description of the underbelly of Oxford life – the homeless camping in the graveyards of its ancient churches, and the women plying their trade in the derelict garages of its bleak outer suburbs – is a salutary contrast to the “Dreaming Spires” trope. Another part of the spell that Simon Mason casts is the difference between what Ray and Ryan face when they go home at night. Ray is met by his eminently sensible and forbearing wife Diane, while Ryan faces only the wrath of his sister, and the fact that Ryan junior has fallen asleep yet again without a bed-time story from his dad. This book will be published by Riverrun on 18th January.

January 12, 2024 0

THE TEACHER . . . Between the covers

This is a welcome return for Tim Sullivan’s distinctive copper, Detective Sergeant George Cross. Based in Bristol, the series is centred upon this unusual police officer – unusual in that he has a mental condition variously described as Autism, or Aspergers Syndrome. Common symptoms of the condition include lavish attention to detail, the inability to understand figurative speech and an intense reliance on pattern and repetition in personal life. I loved the previous book, The Monk, and you can read what I thought by clicking the link.

Now, in a village not far from Bristol an elderly man has been found dead at the foot of the stairs in his cottage. Alistair Moreton was not well-loved in Crockerne . The former headmaster of a private school was abrupt and aloof – except at parish council meetings when he objected to anything and everything on the agenda, mainly because he could, and because he took pleasure at being a contrarian.

A few years previously, he had been wrongfully implicated in the disappearance of a local schoolgirl, and much damage was done before she presented herself at a London police station, admitting she had just run away from home. Moreton had managed to alienate almost everyone in Crockerne, particularly the London couple – the Cockerells – who had a weekend cottage next to his, and with whom he had engaged in several lengthy – and expensive – legal battles.

Moreton’s son Sandy is an MP whose right-wing views have resulted in his being ‘recalled’ by his constituents, and so he faces a by-election. When George Cross’s temporary boss, DI Bobby Warner makes a premature arrest, and organises a press conference alongside Sandy Moreton, Cross quietly continues his own investigations, troubled by the fact that Alistair Moreton’s ‘set-in-stone’ daily routine had changed significantly over the two weeks prior to his death.

Cross discovers that Moreton’s tenure as headmaster of All Saints was characterised by brutality and a cruel disregard, and that there are many grown men whose childhoods were disfigured by beatings at the school – and the almost universal disbelief of their parents when they were told what was going on. A Facebook group of All Saints ‘survivors’ has been set up, and Cross comes to think that Moreton’s killer may be one of the members.

Along the way we have an intriguing glimpse into Cross’s family life. His father came out as gay later in life, but his partner has died, while Cross’s mother has remarried. A local priest is perhaps the closest thing Cross has to a friend and the cleric – Stephen – acts as an unofficial master of ceremonies in this unusual ménage.

The Crown Prosecution Service have been persuaded to put Barnaby Cotterell on trial for murder, but the case falls apart. Meanwhile disturbing information has come to light about the professional behaviour (or otherwise) of DI Bobby Warner.

Tim Sullivan leads us a merry dance and we whirl through a plethora of potential killers until, with just a few pages to go, we finally learn just who – from a classroom full of suspects – did away with the vicious and sadistic former schoolmaster. George Cross is a remarkable character – resolute, hugely intelligent, baffling to many of his colleagues, but blessed with insights that make him unique among modern fictional coppers. The Teacher is published by Head of Zeus and will be available on 18th January.

January 10, 2024 0

TED LEWIS . . . A Lincolnshire perspective

Alfred Edward Lewis was born in Stretford, Manchester on 15th January 1940, but in 1946 the family moved to Barton upon Humber. Five years later, Lewis passed his 11+ and began attending the town’s grammar school. There, he was fortunate enough to come under the influence of an English teacher called Henry Treece. Treece was born in Staffordshire, but had moved to Lincolnshire in 1939, and although he ‘did his bit’ as an RAF intelligence officer, he was able to make his name during the war years as a poet.

Ted Lewis excelled at both Art and English, and when it came to leaving school, he was desperate to go to Art School in Hull (now the Hull School of Art and Design). His parents thought this idea frivolous and a waste of time, and were determined that he should get ‘a proper job’ locally. Henry Treece interceded on Lewis’s behalf and was able to persuade his parents to let the young man cross the murky waters of the Humber to study.

After leaving the college, it seemed that Lewis was going to make his way as an artist and illustrator, and a book written by Alan Delgado, variously called The Hot Water Bottle Mystery or The Very Hot Water Bottle, can be had these days for not very much money, and the description on seller sites usually adds “Illustrated by Edward Lewis”. That was the first serious money Ted ever made. He moved to London in the early 1960s to further his prospects.

His first published novel was All the Way Home and All the Night Through (1965) and it is a semi-autobiographical account of the lives and loves of art students in Hull. I remember borrowing it from the local library not long after it came out and, looking back, it was a far cry from the novels that would make Lewis’s fame and fortune.

Five years later, Lewis was getting regular script work in television, but now his second novel was published. Its original title was Jack’s Return Home. I believe that to be a reference to a mock Victorian melodrama of the same name, that featured in a Tony Hancock episode called The East Cheam Drama Festival. In Lewis’s book, the main character is Jack Carter, a London gangster returning to his home town to investigate the death of his brother. Re-badged as Get Carter, it was made into one of the finest British films ever made. It was released in March 1970, and Lewis is credited, along with director Mike Hodges, with the screenplay. Incidentally, a hardback first edition of JRH can be yours – a snip at just £3,250 (admittedly with a hand-written note by the author)

Although the film is clearly set in Newcastle, the action in the book takes place in the far less glamorous setting of a ‘steel city’ much closer to where Lewis grew up – Scunthorpe, obviously. Sadly, the town was already regarded as a metaphor for somewhere awful, and the butt of many jokes, so setting Lewis’s story there would probably have been box office suicide.

Lewis wrote more novels, none achieving quite the success of Get Carter, although he returned to the character in his penultimate novel Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977). By this time, however, Lewis was in a self induced spiral of decline, mainly due to alcohol abuse. His final novel, which many critics believe to be his finest was GBH, published in 1980. Here, he unequivocally returns to Lincolnshire, and a bleak and down-beat out-of-season seaside town which is obviously Mablethorpe. The central character is George Fowler, a mobster who has made a living out of distributing porn movies, but has crossed the wrong people, and needs somewhere to hide up for a while. Rather like his creator, Fowler is in the darkest of dark places, and the novel ends in brutal and surreal fashion on a deserted Lincolnshire beach, with the wind howling in from the north sea as Fowler meets his maker in the remains of an RAF bombing target.

With his marriage over and career in ruins, Lewis returned home to Barton, to live with his mother, but his health had gone, and the Grimsby Evening Telegraph ran this melancholy story on 30th March 1982. There is something deeply sad about a man who had the world at his feet, immensely gifted as a writer and artist, and a man whose literary legacy would prove to be immense, being taken by ambulance from a modest semi in Ferriby Road to a ward in Scunthorpe hospital, where he would die a few days later.

So what was the legacy of Ted Lewis? Some critics have dubbed him ‘England’s Albert Camus’. I don’t buy into that, for any number of reasons, one of which is that I have never knowingly been captivated by any book written by the French existentialist, while GBH, to name but one of Lewis’s books, gripped me by the throat and never let go until I had reached the final page. Another description of Lewis is that he was the ‘Godfather of English Noir.’ There isn’t time here to go into what is and isn’t ‘Noir’ in books and films, but let’s settle for a few descriptions, in no particular order: bleakly pessimistic; realistic; violent; deeply flawed characters; full of dark humour.

The more sharp-eyed of you will see that the cover of GBH bears the legend ‘with an afterword by Derek Raymond.’ Raymond (aka Robin Cook) was also self destructive, but he managed to survive until 1994, and left a catalogue of brutal, compassionate and disturbing crime novels, perhaps the best of which is I Was Dora Suarez. There is no evidence that Raymond was influenced by Lewis, but he clearly recognised a kindred spirit. But this article is about Lincolnshire. Lewis’s life – and his greatest novels – are book-ended by the county. He described the grimy and frequently corrupt world of a town dominated by a thriving steel industry (Scunthorpe) in Jacks’ Return Home and – when his personal life was in total disarray – he made his last words play out in GBH, resonating over the often bleak seashores around Mablethorpe, a place he must have visited with his parents when he was young. For George Fowler, however, there was not to be the long walk from the railway station to the beach; no arcades with penny slot machines, not a sniff of the intoxicating sweetness of candy floss, no jingling of bells from the donkey rides, and not a hint of the itchy reassurance of Mablethorpe sand between his toes. All that remained was an almost surreal death, which Lewis described brilliantly, while making sure we readers were never certain about what was real and what was not.

The good folk of Barton upon Humber have, perhaps rather belatedly, chosen to honour their two most famous literary sons. There is a Ted Lewis Centre, and his mentor from back in the day is acknowledged with a blue plaque. For a more detailed account of Ted Lewis’s life, I can recommend Getting Carter by Nick Triplow.

December 28, 2023 0

MURDER ON THE CHRISTMAS EXPRESS . . . Between the covers

Alexandra Benedict (left) has confected a seasonal version of the traditional locked room mystery. Our locked room is actually a train, heading from Euston to Fort William just a few hours before the big day, but forced to stop in the middle of nowhere because of deep snow. Former Metropolitan Police copper Roz Parker is heading north on the train, not particularly for Christmas, but to be with her daughter who is about to give birth.

Her immediate fellow passengers are not people she would have chosen to be her traveling companions. There is Meg, a brittle, vacuous, Instagram-joined-at-birth, reality TV star and ‘influencer’, who live streams every moment of her life to her adoring followers. She was my odds on favourite to be bumped off, even before the Amazon publicity page for the book confirmed that it was she whose demise Roz would be investigating. Her boyfriend, Grant, is what they used to call ‘a nasty piece of work.’ By complete contrast we have Sally and Phil. Sally is stressed, jealous, and the mum-of-four, while husband Phil is a devoted dad and former teacher of Meg, the soon-to-be victim of the unknown killer.

Benedict sets out her list of suspects in the traditional way. Beck is a rather self-obsessed student and a passionate pub quizzer, while red parka-wearing Ember is an unhappy woman in her thirties with a dark past. A train steward, nicknamed ‘Beefy’, appears avuncular and honest, but it turns out he had a fixation with Meg – as did the mysterious Iain, who has no ticket for the the journey, therefore is keen not to be discovered by Beefy. He has gone one further than Beefy’s doe-eyed worship of Meg, and has stalked her to the extent of having a restraining order slapped on him. How about Craig, who Roz has taken a shine to? But he works for the Crown Prosecution Service so, surely, it can’t be him, can it?

The mechanics of ‘whodunnits’ are not particularly complex for writers, but for readers (who don’t cheat and skip to the last chapter) things can be be more complex. In this case, do we say that it couldn’t be Grant, because that would be too obvious? Or, do we think that the author is double bluffing us, and that it is the self-centred narcissist after all? It couldn’t be Phil, could it? Or did something happen back in the day when Meg was his pupil?

Needless to say, Roz Parker has to put aside her anxieties about her soon-to-be grandchild, and find out who killed Meg, a woman who may have been the most insubstantial of role-models, but was still a human being who deserves justice. Murder on the Christmas Express casts a sardonic eye over the way we live now, throwing in a conception-by-sperm donor for Roz’s daughter, and a sapiosexual love affair (look it up – I had to) while retaining its connection to the skillfully plotted murder mysteries of The Golden Age. For good measure, the author throws in some additional quiz attractions such as embedding the titles of Kate Bush songs in the narrative, and sprinkling some anagrams of her favourite poems and stories within the text. This entertaining novel is published by Simon and Schuster and is available now.

November 9, 2023 0

THE CHRISTMAS APPEAL . . . Between the covers

Janice Hallett (left) invites us to return to the idyllic village of Lower Lockwood, where her book The Appeal (2021) was set. Then, law students Charlotte Holroyd and Femi Hassan solved a particularly nasty murder but, goodness me, murder seems to haunt Lower Lockwood rather as it does the unfortunate community of Midsomer, and so they are back again when another corpse is found, threatening the production of the annual village panto. Was ever a production of Jack and The Beanstalk so fraught with difficulties?

Our two sleuths (now fully qualified) spend little time on their hands and knees with magnifying glasses looking for minute physical traces which may betray the assailant; rather, they sit in front of their smartphones, perusing emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and other communications floating around in the digital ether. The clues are all there and, unlike the ancient trope of detectives trying to read messages from letters hastily burnt in fireplaces, these words can never be totally erased.

This novella is inventively set up with little or no conventional narrative and makes extensive use of graphics representing WhatsApp messages (above) and emails which are now known as ’round-robins’. Being an old pedant, I have to say that this is a misuse of the expression, as the dictionary says:

The term has come to be used to describe emails cc-d to multiple recipients, and those awful little printed slips inside Christmas cards telling friends (not for much longer, if I get them) all the wonderful things that have been happening to the sender’s family since the last Christmas card. Janice Hallett, by the way, makes fun of these dreadful things from the word go.

But I digress. You will either love the set up of the story, or hate it. I enjoyed it while it lasted – just 187 pages – but I suspect it wouldn’t work in a longer book.

The story begins when Charlotte and Femi receive a massive folder (all digital of course) of evidence from their former mentor, Roderick Tanner KC. The folder contains transcriptions of police interviews and copies of all communications between those involved when a long-dead body in a Santa Suit was found hidden in a giant beanstalk prop – made mostly of wood, papier–mâché and, heaven forfend, possible traces of asbestos. The beanstalk was constructed years previously for a production of the play, and so this is the coldest of cold cases. The mystery is solved as Charlotte and Femi pick up the hints from the emails, texts and messages, but along the way, Janice Hallett takes the you-know-what out of some of the more insufferable pretensions in modern society (below).

The Christmas Appeal initially deceives as it seems to wear a cloak embroidered with ‘Cosy Crime’, but this is soon shed in favour of some rather sharp satire. It has wit, charm and flair and is published by Viper. It is available now.

November 9, 2023 0