Historical Crime Fiction

THE IRON WATER … Between the covers

I am not suggesting that it is a good idea, but were you to cut Chris Nickson open, you would probably find – after the fashion of Queen Mary – the word ‘Leeds’ engraved on his heart. He is clearly passionate and protective about the city of his birth, and this shines like a beacon from every page of The Iron Water, another case for the Leeds copper Tom Harper. Set in the summer of 1893 it is, on one level, a straightforward Victorian police procedural, but it is more. Much more.

Nickson wears his social justice heart very much on his sleeve, and he doesn’t shrink from describing the vile conditions still experienced by poor families at the time. There is nothing of the cosy period piece about the book, but Nickson doesn’t make the mistake of allowing his fervour to turn the story into a collection of protest pamphlets, in spite of Annabelle, Harper’s lovely wife, taking a position within a campaigning Suffragist movement in the city.

Harper, all of a sudden, has bodies on his hands. There’s the corpse which floats up from the depths of a local lake after a demonstration of a new water-borne weapon, the torpedo. Then there’s the girl. Well, at least her leg, which is recovered from the canal. And what’s to be made of the body of a minder usually employed by one of the city’s criminal gangs? Being garrotted is definitely not the usual fate of Leeds murder victims.

Two gang bosses, one of Irish heritage and the other local, are engaged in a tense truce. They will hold off attacking each other while Harper and his fellow officers track down the mysterious copper-headed man who appears to be connected to the deaths. Time is running out, however, and there is an even more calamitous threat hanging over the heads of the police. The powers-that-be want answers, and as Harper runs around in ever decreasing circles, he is told that if he doesn’t find the killer, then men from Scotland Yard will travel north and take over the case. This, for Harper and his boss Superintendent Kendall, will be the ultimate disgrace.

The descriptions of the city as it swelters in the summer heat, are masterly. You can almost taste the sweat, sense the baking hot cobbles under your feet as you walk, smell the dray horses and feel your throat burning from the chemical tang produced by the factories which have made Leeds a grand place to make money – for the privileged few. There’s a terrific paragraph which goes:

“The July heat showed no sign of breaking. All the faces he passed on the pavement looked on edge. Thoughts of violence hung over their heads. Another day or two and there’d be fights. Men would beat their wives over nothing at all. There’d be woundings and killings in the pubs and beershops.”

That has echoes of Raymond Chandler’s lines from Red Wind (1938) which begin:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch..”

But Nickson’s version fits just as beautifully into the cauldron of industrial Leeds as Chandler’s did into the hot California night.

Eventually, almost as the Scotland Yard men are about to board their train at King’s Cross, a flurry of violence and revenge seems to tie up the case, but Nickson is much too good to allow it to rest there, and the unease Harper feels about the closing of the case proves justified when he has one more terrifying ordeal to face.

The Iron Water is published by Severn House, and is available both in hardback and as a Kindle.

November 29, 2016 0

SKIN AND BONE …Between the covers

Georgian England in the early autumn of 1743. The George in question is Number Two, and earlier in the year he had the distinction of being the last monarch to lead British troops in battle, that being at Dettingen, where an uneasy alliance of British, Austrian and Hanoverian forces – known, bizarrely, as ‘The Pragmatic Army’ – defeated those eternal adversaries, the French.

This, then, is the England of Handel and Hogarth (at least he was English) and the looming threat from the Jacobites north of the border. Author Robin Blake, (left) however resists the easy win of setting his story in the bustle of London. Instead, he takes us to the town of Preston, sitting on the banks of the River Ribble in Lancashire.

Titus Cragg is a lawyer, and the coroner for the town. He is called to investigate a macabre and piteous discovery – that of a tiny baby found at the bottom of a malodorous sludge-filled pit, one of several used by tanners in the town to turn rough animal hides into leather. Once the muck and slurry have been washed away from the infant, Cragg discovers a nasty wound on the back of its head. It takes a more detailed examination by a local physician – Luke Fidelis – to reveal that the little girl did indeed die from violence, but of a much more sinister kind.

The investigations carried out by Cragg and Fidelis reveal a growing schism between the tanners and the wealthy men of property who run the town’s affairs. The leather workers are an inward looking community. This state is mostly driven by the fact that they live and work alongside the noisome waste materials – mostly faeces and urine – which are essential to the tanning process, and therefore most local people literally turn up their noses at the tanners. The burgesses and council-men of Preston, on the other hand, have their eyes on what they believe to be an acre or so of valuable land – ripe for redevelopment – currently occupied by the tannery.

What’s in a name? To answer the ill-fated Juliet, there is always something. Cragg, as his name suggests has something rock-like about him, while Fidelis has a touch of enigma and mystery. Fidelis, the more exotic of the pair, causes suspicion among the bluff Lancastrians of Preston, if only because his modern views and deep knowledge of the science of medicine contrast dramatically with the more superstitious practices of other local doctors. Cragg and Fidelis do eventually discover the truth about the awful death of the baby, but not before Preston is set on its collective ear by another murder and the downfall of one of its most respected residents and his family.

Skin and Bone scores highly in all the categories which make for good historical crime fiction. At its core it has an intriguing and inventive mystery, not just a standard murder parachuted into a period setting. The Georgian details are established without fuss, showmanship or over-anxious dollops of historical fact splashed on the canvas in the name of authenticity. Most importantly, the dialogue is natural and untainted by any attempt to create what the author might imagine to be the vernacular speech of the time. Cragg – and his wife – are likeable and convincing, while Fidelis provides just enough forensic flair to point his friend in the right investigative direction.

This is the fourth Cragg and Fidelis story and it came out in Kindle earlier this year. The hardback is out today, 25th October and the paperback will be out on 3^rd November, You can check further details of this and the previous books at Robin Blake’s own website, or his Amazon author page.

October 25, 2016 0

THE BLACK FRIAR … Between the covers

Shona MacLean opens the door of her time machine and takes us to the city of London in the third year of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, 1655. It is almost exactly six years since the severed head of King Charles was shown to the crowd around the scaffold in Whitehall, but Cromwell’s England is still a troubled place. There are still pockets of secret Royalist sympathy up and down the land, and the dead king’s son is in exile, waiting his moment to return.

By far the deepest thorn in Cromwell’s side, however, are firebrand extremist preachers (some things never change) who believe that The Lord Protector has compromised the purity of the cause. One such group is The Fifth Monarchists, a group of zealots who hold true to a strange prophecy in the Book of Daniel, which said that the four kingdoms of Babylon, Persia, Macedonia and Rome would pass away before the fifth kingdom would be visited on the earth – that of Christ himself.

We are quickly introduced to a stern and forbidding Yorkshire soldier called Damian Seeker. He is a veteran of the recent wars, and is now a Captain of the State Guard. It seems that he is directly answerable to Secretary Thurloe, Cromwell’s spymaster – and to Old Noll himself. When the body of a man, dressed in the distinctive black robes of the Dominican order, is found walled up in a ruined priory, those involved are amazed that the corpse is relatively intact after 300 years of entombment. Seeker lets the rumour fly around the streets of the city, but he soon realises that not only has the man been dead only for a matter of weeks, but that he knows his identity.

The dead man is none other than Carter Blythe, one of Thurloe’s most secretive and effective agents. He had embedded himself at the heart of a group of Fifth Monarchists in order to keep track of their plans for insurrection, but he has clearly been rumbled. While keeping the dead man’s true identity a close secret, Seeker – whose surname has earned him the sinister but appropriate appellation of The Seeker – tries to discover the fate of a number of children who have mysteriously disappeared in recent weeks.

The author introduced us to Seeker in her 2015 novel, The Seeker. He is big, tough, implacable – and more or less indestructible. This enables him to stride about the place with great physical authority, and where this is ineffective, he seems to have a direct line to the most powerful man in the country – The Lord Protector himself. The scene–setting is excellent, and I breathed a sigh of relief when it became obvious that MacLean has allowed her characters to talk to each other relatively normally, without any attempt to replicate the conversational mannerisms of the time – whatever they may have been.

MacLean (right) has great fun with prominent real-life characters who would certainly have been involved in affairs of state at the time. We have a nicely imagined Andrew Marvell, the poet best known for his erotic supplication To His Coy Mistress, and a walk on part for Samuel Pepys. The great diarist is merely a clerk at The Exchequer, but his later reputation as a serial seducer of young women is hinted at. We see the spymaster John Thurloe apparently at death’s door with some unspecified illness, but in real life he was to survive the restoration of the monarchy, and died peacefully in his bed in 1668.

This is, I suppose, a 17^th century police procedural, and eventually Seeker gathers his evidence, exposes a Royalist plot, and enhances his reputation as the Jack Reacher of his day. The Black Friar is recommended to anyone who might like a convincing glimpse of old London, with a decent cast of villains and a sturdy plot. The Black Friar is out today, 6th October, and is published by Quercus.

The image below shows contemporary portraits (left to right) of
Andrew Marvell, Samuel Pepys and John Thurloe.

portraits

October 5, 2016 0

WW2 HISTORICAL FICTION (3) – The Pale House

It may have been difficult for people of my parents’ generation who lived – and fought – through the grim years of WWII to distinguish one German from another. It is entirely understandable that the differences between card-carrying members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and the ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen who carried out their wishes might be rather academic, especially if your street had just blown up around your ears, or you were sitting at a table clutching a telegram informing you that your husband, brother or son had been shot dead or drowned in battle.

The first author to write fiction from the viewpoint of the German military was the controversial Danish author known as Sven Hassel. His first novel Legion of The Damned (1953) was the first in a series describing the war through the eyes of men in the 27^th (Penal) Panzer Regiment. The books were immensely successful, particularly in the UK, in spite of the fact that Hassel – real name Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen – was widely regarded as a traitor in his native land, because of his war service with the Wehrmacht.

More recently, Philip Kerr has written a series of very cleverly researched and convincing novels centred around a German policeman – Bernie Gunther – who manages to keep his self-respect more or less intact, despite working alongside such monsters as Reinhard Heydrich, Josef Goebbels and Arthur Nebe. The series has Gunther involved with all manner of military and political events, from the rise of Hitler in the 1930s right through to the days of the Peron rule in 1950s Argentina.

Gregor Reinhardt, like Gunther, is a former officer with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei, but lacks Gunther’s ability to duck and dive, bob and weave. He is forced out by the Nazis, but Luke-McCallin_website-cropped-June-2014 finds employment as an officer in the Feldjaegerkorps. His creator, Luke McCallin, (right) introduced us to Hauptmann Reinhardt in The Man From Berlin (2014). In The Pale House (2015) Reinhardt is still at the extreme edge of what was, by 1945, the crumbling empire of The Third Reich. He is in Sarajevo, where the situation is, to put it mildly, anarchic. On one side hand are the Croation nationalists, the Ustase. They are, in theory, the allies of Germany, but only insofar as they have a common enemy, the communist Partisans, who are slowly gaining the upper hand.

This unholy Balkan Trinity is completed by a thoroughly disillusioned and war-weary German army who are aware, despite the failed von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler, that there is a savage and brutal race taking place between the Allied forces and the Red Army – the finishing line being Berlin itself. As the German military try to make their inevitable retreat from Sarajevo as orderly as possible, Reinhardt still has his job to do. In particular, he must find who is behind a series of mass killings, where the corpses are found with their faces disfigured. His investigations lead him to the Ustase headquarters on the banks of the Miljacka river.

The headquarters, known as The Pale House, is where the Ustase administer the beatings, torture and eventual murder of those they deem to be a threat. Even more disturbing to Reinhardt than the brutality of his notional allies is the fact that their excesses seem to be linked to his own countrymen – in particular, officers within the Feldgendarmerie, a more rank-and-file military police force than his own.

The Pale House is a gripping and brutal account of a war zone which tended to be overshadowed by the even more dramatic events further to the West. Reinhardt is, emphatically, a good man, and Luke McCallin’s skill is that he presents to us someone who loves his country, despite what it has become. We get a hint, in the final paragraphs, that Reinhardt will survive the political and military firestorm which is about to engulf him and his comrades, and that he will return – in another place, and with other crimes to solve.

You can find out more about the Luke McCallin and Hauptmann Reinhardt at the author’s website.

September 2, 2016 0

STOP PRESS MURDER …Between the covers

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.

Peter Bartram’s mileu of choice is the early 1960s. We are in Brighton, the celebrated seaside town on England’s south coast. Its days of fame as the Gay capital of Western Europe, and infamy as the first large local authority to be mismanaged by the Green Party were yet to come, but the seeds of eccentricity have already been sown. Our guide through the Sussex town is Colin Crampton, the scoop-hungry reporter for The Evening Chronicle – a Brighton newspaper. He is a thoroughly engaging character with a quick wit, and it isn’t too fanciful to imagine that he might resemble the author in his younger days. If you read Bartram’s biography, you will be forgiven for thinking that if Crampton is not Bartram, then he is someone who the author knew very well in his early days as a journalist.

The basic plot is that we have a long-retired star of What The Butler Saw machines – Marie Richmond – who dies in a mysterious road accident. Then, a machine featuring her in her prime is broken into, and the revealing footage is stolen. The man who should have been guarding the pier is found bludgeoned to death – with a coconut. Crampton/Bartram introduces us to some memorable characters, including a camp, overdressed theatre critic and a toupéed old thespian, both of whom are crying out for the much-missed talents of John Inman and Charles Hawtry to bring them to life.

As Crampton attempts to unravel the mystery of why the ample charms of a silent movie star should have given someone cause for murder, there are some delightful period references and jokes which made me laugh out loud, although younger readers might not get the gags unless they are students of British popular culture in the second half of the 20^th century.

There may well be readers who, by this point, have been receiving ‘cosy’ messages on their genre radar. All well and good, as there are elements of cosy crime here. We have an unambiguously likeable central character, a familiar and lovingly-painted background, and a cast which includes several amiably odd characters. We reviewers love our genres, and some readers may even share this obsession, so I’ll pop Stop Press Murder into the Cosy pigeonhole, with one or two caveats. Although the tone is generally as gentle and as light as a Brighton breeze, Bartram finds enough dark corners in the seaside town to keep the interest of those who like their crime fiction with a harder edge. The style of the book reminds me very much of the sharply humorous writing of Colin Watson and his Flaxborough novels, which also delight in the dafter aspects of English life, as well as boasting a collection of folk with similarly improbable surnames

Crampton is convinced that there is a link between the odd events on the pier, and discovers that Richmond – or to use her real name, Sybil Clackett – has a twin sister who is no lesser personage than the Dowager Marchioness of Piddinghoe. The local police and the Chronicle’s rival newspapers are seeing the case differently, however, and Mr Figgis, Crampton’s boss, is becoming increasingly twitchy as he fears for his sales figures.

Peter Bartram explores all possibilities inherent in the twin sisters storyline, and delivers an excellent novel, full of twists and turns, plenty of action scenes, crackling dialogue – and a great sense of fun. I’m looking forward to yet more encounters with the Evening Chronicle’s star turn. You can find a copy of Stop Press Murder by following the link.

SPM Graphic2

August 30, 2016 0

CHARCOAL JOE … Between The Covers

“This money is from me, Easy. I’m the one hirin’ you”
“Cheddar or blue?” I asked, taking the cash.
“Say what?”
“I just wanna know what kind of cheese is in this trap.”

Thus Walter Mosley’s Los Angeles PI Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins takes a thick wad of cash from his long term buddy Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander, as a down payment on his latest case, to extricate 25 year-old Dr – of physics – Seymour Brathwaite from a murder rap. The fact that Easy, like a huge number of fellow Angelinos, could never say “no” to Mouse, is one thing; Mouse may well be the most dangerous man in the city, but the legendary Charcoal Joe is probably next in line. And it’s Joe who had called in a favour of Mouse.

Seymour Brathwaite has been found at a murder scene in Malibu beach with two corpses lying on the floor. When LAPD’s finest catch a black man at the scene of a shooting, that’s normally case closed, give or take a few minutes of paperwork, but this is different. Brathwaite has no connection with either the corpses or crime in general, and he seems to have a very powerful friend in underworld fixer, arranger of violent death and generally lethal string puller Rufus Tyler – better known as Charcoal Joe.

Joe is currently residing in one of LA’s more relaxed and well appointed correctional facilities, serving a short sentence for some minor infraction. Easy pays him a visit to learn more about why young Dr Brathwaite was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and finds Joe attended by his minders and gophers. He asks why Joe is so convinced of Seymour’ innocence.

“The young man is a doctor of science,” Rufus Tyler the prodigy intoned. “He’s teachin’ at UCLA right this semester while he finishes his postgraduate work. Now how’s a man like that gonna be some kinda niggah like the people you and me consort with?”
I could think of a dozen ways. The universities in the late sixties were hotbeds of bombers, Liberation bank robbers and stone-cold killers.

Despite his misgivings, Easy sets about his work. At this point, it may be the moment to bring people new to the series up to speed with the who, what and why of the world of Easy Rawlins. Our man fought for Uncle Sam in WW2, and returned to an America where the yoke of oppression may have been lifted in Western Europe, but not in hometown USA. Battling everyday racism, put-downs and casual affronts, he has survived death on several occasions by the thickness of a cigarette paper, managed to earn the grudging respect of certain members of the LAPD, and has raised a family – albeit an unconventional one. Conscious that his work is always attracting new readers Mosley – like the weaver of dreams he is – fills in the biography with the deftest of touches, as he goes along.

Inevitably, Easy is being lied to by pretty much everyone involved in the case of the naïve Dr Brathwaite. The body count is spectacular, and even as he mourns the loss of his best love, Easy manages to squeeze in a couple of ‘romantic encounters’. The euphemism is mine. One of Mosley’s skills is to dance his way deftly through the minefield that faces writers who tackle sex scenes. Where many tread too heavily and die, Mosley escapes unscathed.

Mosley009 The plot, as they say, thickens – to the point where you may need to skip back a few pages just to be sure that you are certain who has done what to whom. To me, this is neither here nor there. Sometimes cliches are unavoidable because they tell a simple truth, and with any Easy Rawlins novel it is all about the journey rather than the destination. An Easy Rawlins tale is what you get when a poet writes crime fiction. If Raymond Chandler were a deity, then I would worship him, but I would be hard pressed to summarise the detailed plots of Philip Marlow’s cases. I could, however, rattle off a dozen one-liners and brilliant descriptions which have made Chandler immortal. So it is with Mosley.

Easy goes to an illegal club called The Black Door Bar, and is reunited with an old flame.

“Hey, Easy,” Louise Lash said.
She was maybe forty with a face that would be beautiful twenty years after her death. Her skin was black and flawless. Even when she wasn’t talking her mouth seemed to be saying something elusive.

Read this book, and cherish it. Mosley is not an old man by today’s standards, but there will come a time when there will be no more Easy Rawlins, and the world will be a poorer place for his passing.

Follow the link to get your copy of Charcoal Joe.

August 14, 2016 0

WW2 HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION (1) A Lily of the Field

EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD LIST, and I’m no exception. To kick off a series of features on historical crime fiction, I am starting with my own favourite period – World War 2. I just missed it, by a couple of years, but both my mother and father served, as did my wife’s parents, and so ‘The War’, as it was always known in our house was – and remains – very much part of my consciousness. My selection is subjective, and there is no order of merit, but each of the five is a cracking read.

A LILY OF THE FIELD by John Lawton

Lawton is a master of historical fiction set in and around the war. His central character is Fred Troy, a policeman of Russian descent. His emigré father is what used to be called a ‘Press Baron’. Fred’s brother Rod will go on to become a Labour Party MP in the 1960s, but is interned during the war. His sisters are bit players, but memorable for their sexual voracity. Neither man nor woman is safe from their advances.

Apart from being an elegant and sharp-tongued writer, Lawton’s great skill is to people his books with real personalities of the period. Sometimes they are thinly disguised, but more often than not they play themselves. Across the spread of Fred Troy novels, we meet, in no particular order, Nikita Kruschev, the entire Labour Shadow Cabinet, Winston Churchill’s gunmaker and an American presidential candidate.

Fred becomes one of London’s top coppers, but to categorise the novels as police procedurals is accurate only in as far as that there are policemen in the books, and they occasionally have procedures. All this being said, Troy is in the background during much of A Lily of the Field. We follow the life of teenager Méret Voytek, a brilliant young Viennese cellist. Through her own naivete and a tragic act of fate, she is caught holding a bundle of anti-Nazi leaflets while traveling on the tram. She is taken by the SS and ends up in Auschwitz. Meanwhile, her parents have been likewise detained, and their family home ransacked.

In the bitterest of paradoxes, the Auschwitz commandant, has a musical ear, and so he puts together an orchestra made up of the many skilled inmates. One of their bizarre duties is to play beautiful music as their less talented companions trudge off to work in the morning. Méret plays for her life, literally. The physical privations she undergoes are heart-breaking, but still she plays, still she clings on to what is left of life.

In January 1945, with the Russians approaching from the east, and the British and Americans from the west, the Germans realise that the game is up. Auschwitz inmates who are too infirm to walk are shot, and the remainder are sent out, under guard, to start the infamous Death March. In the freezing conditions few survive, but just as Meret is about to succumb, their column is overtaken by a Russian detachment. Salvation? Hardly. The first instinct of the Russian soldiers is to rape the women. Méret is saved by a no-nonsense officer. At this point, Fred Troy aficionados will recognise Major Larissa Tosca, Fred’s one-time lover. She has, in her time, spied for both America and for Russia, but here her cap bears the Red Star.

Long-time Lawton readers will know that he leaps about between the years with a sometimes bewildering agility. True to form, the climax of this book is played out in post war London and Paris. Méret’s rescue by the Russians has come at a price, and we find her tangled up in the spy ‘games’ which characterised much of the Cold War period. Lawton is much too clever a writer just to tell this one tale, however gripping it may be. Woven into the fabric is another thread which involves an interned Hungarian physicist, Dr. Karel Szabo, who ends up as a key figure in the American efforts to build and test the first atomic bomb.

One of the key figures from the spy ring of which Méret is a part is murdered in London, and it is then that Frec Troy becomes involved. For all his many qualities, Troy is an inveterate womaniser, but he is not a sexual beast, and the late scenes where he spends time with the fragile Méret, still beautiful but old before her time, are haunting in their compassion.

‘Troy had never heard her laugh. It was like that moment in Ninotchka when Garbo laughs on-screen for the first time. It is not merely that she laughs, but that she laughs so long and so loud.

As the laughter subsided she was grasping at words and not managing to get a sentence out.

“Oh, Troy ….oh, Troy..this is….this is a farce. Don’t you see? Viktor taught us the same part.”
“We’re two left-handed women trying to dance backward. Neither of us knows the man’s part.”

She reached up her sleeve for a handkerchief to dab her tears and found none. Troy gave her his, a huge square of Irish linen with an overfancy ‘f’ in one corner.

Being drunk did not make her loquacious. In that, she was like Troy. At two in the morning Voytek was deeply asleep in front of the fire. Troy picked her up, astonished at how little she weighed, carried her upstairs and slid her into the spare bed. She did not wake. He went to his own bed.’

A Lily of the Field is far from being a dry history novel where the factual details are more important than the plot and the dialogue. It is tense, funny, occasionally very violent, and written with a style and fluency which leaves lesser authors struggling in Lawton’s wake. A final little gem, which I only noticed recently. If you look closely at the cover, you can see Méret Voytek, in her red coat, moving away from us. With her cello slung over her shoulder, she walks into history.

A Lily of the Field is available in all formats, and John Lawton has his own Amazon page
and website.

July 15, 2016 0