murder

HER SISTER’S KILLER . . . Between the covers

All too often, opening pages of crime novels headed ‘Prologue’ are enigmatic flashbacks, and they leave the reader wondering what their relevance is to the emerging narrative. Not so here. It is short, brutal and and painfully obvious. A Tyneside detective has been called to a murder scene. The body is that of his teenage daughter. That was then.

Now. For some arcane reason, when police Sergeants are promoted to Inspector, they have to serve a term in uniform, away from their home station. So it is that Frances ‘Frankie’ Oliver – the younger sister of the girl whose murder is revealed in the prologue – is sent away from the city hub of Newcastle to the relative backwater of Berwick – England’s last outpost before the Scottish border. Her first major call-out is a serious RTA – with fatalities. In the back of a wrecked van, Frankie finds a seriously injured child, his wrist secured to a stanchion with cable ties.

Meanwhile, DCI David Stone – Frankie’s on-off romantic interest, acting on loose talk overheard at a police social function, has reopened the investigation into the unsolved murder of Joanna Oliver. Frankie’s secondment to Berwick takes on a life of its own as, amid the wreckage beside the A1, evidence emerges that an organised crime gang has been hard at work trafficking children.

Mari Hannah has penned a classic ‘two plot’, novel, in that DI Frankie Oliver is heading up a multi-agency investigation into a Bulgarian people smuggling gang, while DCI David Stone is in charge of a covert cold-case operation into the murder of Frankie’s sister. Why covert? Stone believes that a serving policeman was her killer and, the law being what it is, any involvement by Frankie Oliver would mean the case would be thrown out of court.

I have meta-tagged this book as a police procedural which, on one level, it is. There is so much more, however. Mari Hannah’s ability to create vividly authentic characters is here for all to see. In no particular order, we have retired copper Frank Oliver, father of Frances, the murdered Joanna and older sister Rae; his torment at being called to a murder scene, only to find that the victim is his own daughter is lifelong; Frankie herself is a brilliant police officer, fearless but vulnerable, intuitive but analytical; David Stone is a ruthless career policeman but, like Frank Stone, the scar on his heart from when his former lover, Jane, was shot dead by an insane gunman, has never healed; I was also particularly taken with rookie PC Indira Sharma who, apart from his boss (Detective Superintendent Bright) is Stone’s only confidante. She is new to the job, but incisive, courageous and has a gimlet eye for detail.

The best crime novels have an authentic sense of place and location and, as with her Kate Daniels novels, Mari Hannah’s heart is never far from England’s north east and the contrast between the bright lights of ‘big city’ Newcastle, and the windswept horizons of rural Northumbria. There is so much to admire about this novel but I suspect, like me, you will be left breathless by David Stone’s ruthless and remorseless interview room demolition of Joanna Oliver’s killer at the end of the book. I don’t do checklists, but if I did, I would be ticking the boxes for brilliant thriller, credible characters, narrative verve, great sense of place and bloody good read. Her Sister’s Killer is published by Orion and is available now.

March 11, 2025 0

THE NEW COUPLE IN 5B . . . Between the covers

This is a classic example of what one critic, perhaps unkindly, called ‘anxiety porn.’ Rosie and Chad Lowan are a young New York couple, she a writer with a moderately successful first novel, but struggling with the second: he is an actor, yearning for the big break. Bit parts in commercials and the role of Third Witch in an adventurous off-Broadway production of The Scottish Play help with the bills, but the couple are just about solvent. Then, fortune seems to smile on them. They have been providing end-of-life care to an Ivan, an elderly journalist who owns an apartment in The Windermere, an exclusive and historic building – think The Dakota, and you are close.

When the old man dies and (ignoring his daughter) leaves the apartment to Rosie and Chad it looks as if all their Christmases have come at once, but this is a psychological thriller, so we know things are going to turn nasty in short order. The apartment has, apparently, seen its shared of tragedies over the decades and, before long, strange things begin to happen.The Windermere has, shall we say, a lurid history. Built around the shell of a church destroyed by fire in 1920 (but retaining the gargoyles) it has been the scene of several tragedies. In 1932 its architect and builder, ruined by the Great Depression, dived to his death from a high window. Suicides by various methods and defenestrations, while neither regular nor frequent, have lent a certain ‘character’ to the building.

Inexplicable things start to happen to Rosie. She sees a strange little boy, presumably the spectre of a child who died in the elevator shaft; the imperturbable and ever-present doorman, Abi, although suavely polite, exudes menace; Rosie’s immediate neighbours, Charles and Ella seem kind and gentle, but what are they hiding? And why, on the residents’ internet forum, has the thread Ghosts of the Windermere been deleted by the admins?

When Ivan’s daughter, presumably still smarting at losing out on her inheritance, is found dead, hanging from a beam in her photography studio, la merde frappe le ventilateur, as the French probably don’t say. It doesn’t help that Rosie and her editor, Max, are the ones to find the corpse. Apart from a few chapters which are narrated by a woman who lived in the apartment now occupied by Rosie and Chad, Rosie is the principal narrator. and CriFi convention means that if this is still the case half way through the book, then it is highly unlikely that Rosie is a wrong ‘un. So who are the bad guys? Cui bono?

Frequent readers of this kind of psychological thriller will know that only one thing is certain, and that is that most of the supporting actors are either not who they say they are, or have evil intent towards the central character. So it is here, but you can make your own deductions as the pages fly by. I confess that I have a ‘view’ of modern American CriFi. I am a huge fan of, to name but two, Harlan Coben and Jonathan Kellerman. Each book is polished like a gemstone, slickly plotted and with authentic dialogue. Formulaic? Yes, but – like the ‘secret’ recipes of Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried, it works. Every single time. This novel fits that bill perfectly. What we have here is a readable and engaging thriller with surprises lurking at every bend in the road. If it sticks to the rules of the game, then I am not complaining. It is published by Park Row Books and is available now.

March 5, 2025 0

SANCTUARY . . . Classics revisited

I have come to the novels of William Faulkner (left) late in life. Perhaps that is just as well. I am not sure how, as a younger man, I would have dealt with his baleful accounts of one or two truly awful human beings. Having just read Sanctuary, my first reaction is a sense of having been exposed to the very worst of us. The psychotic little gangster Popeye is an embodiment of genuine evil. He is warped both physically and mentally but seems invulnerable, echoing Shakespeare’s description of Julius Caesar ‘Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus’.

The novel was published in 1931, which in itself gives pause for thought. I can’t think of an earlier novel published as mainstream fiction which dealt with depravity in the same way. The version that made it into print was, however, a toned down version of Faulkner’s original manuscript. In one sense, Sanctuary embodies the way Shakespeare adapted Aeschylean tragedy. Yes, there are truly evil people at work here, but the main characters are fundamentally unremarkable folk who, through a toxic blend of circumstance and human frailty, are brought down.

The story is this. A humdrum lawyer, Horace Benbow, leaves his wife, and makes his way to the town of Jefferson, where he has a property, shared with his sister. On the way, he meets a Memphis gangster known as Popeye, who takes him to a semi-derelict plantation house, where a bootlegger called Lee Goodwin brews his moonshine. Perhaps the only thoroughly decent person in the book is Goodwin’s common-law wife, Ruby. She prostituted herself to raise money for lawyers when he was first tried for murder, stuck by him while he was away fighting in the The Great War, and brings up their sickly child in the most challenging of circumstances. By a trick of fate, 18 year-old college girl Temple Drake ends up at the property. She is assaulted by Popeye, while a simpleton called Tommy is shot dead. Temple is taken off by Popeye to a Memphis brothel run by a woman called Reba, where she meets another petty crook called Red. Goodwin is arrested for the murder of Tommy, and the story hinges on Goodwin’s murder trial, where he is defended by Benbow.

Faulkner’s narrative style in Sanctuary is much more conventional than in some of his other novels. While it is not quite the same as the “show or tell” option, one of his techniques here is for something to happen, but the exact details are only fully revealed to the reader some time after. Three examples: we don’t learn the grim details of what Popeye did to Temple in the corn store until Goodwin’s murder trial: although Temple hints at it very briefly; it is only when Reba and her lady friends are consoling themselves with gin after Red’s funeral that the details of the sordid relationship between Popeye, Temple and Red become clear. Likewise, it is only in the final pages of the novel, when Popeye is on trial for a murder he could not have committed (because he was miles away at the time, murdering someone else) that we learn of his tormented and traumatic childhood.

The courtroom drama has been a fiction staple for decades, and they range from the dry and interminable wrangling of Bleak House, via the comedic genius of Israel Zangwill in The Big Bow Mystery, to the smarts of Michael Connolly’s Micky Haller novels, but it is the trial of Lee Goodwin which becomes the pivotal moment of Sanctuary. The adversarial nature of American court rooms lends itself readily to dramatic fiction even when the court is in some sophisticated city like New York or Boston. When the court is in a febrile small Southern town, the novelist will lick his/her lips in anticipation.

The novel, even its bowdlerised state, had so much in it that was impossible to film at the time and, probably today, too (please don’t give Lars Von Trier any ideas) but in 1933 a cinema version of the story was made, called The Story of Temple Drake, with Miriam Hopkins in the title role. Despite its inevitably sanitised version of the novel, it is said to be one of the films that prompted the Hays Code, a self censuring set of rules by film executives that set out just what could and couldn’t be seen in mainstream films. They tried again in 1961, but this was an amalgamation of Sanctuary and its 1951 sequel Requiem For A Nun. Faulkner, despite holding his nose at some of Hollywood’s excesses, was frequently employed by film makers, most notably as co-writer of the screenplay for Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. He still didn’t manage to resolve the question, “Who killed the chauffeur?”(For aficionados only)

Sanctuary concludes with two men dying for crimes they did not commit, and a young woman whose journey takes her through brutal rape, sexual decadence and perjury reaching a kind of limited restoration, but leaving behind her a trail of broken lives. Some commentators have decided the book is an allegory, and when people decide on this approach they inevitably disagree on what it is an allegory of, and choices range from the destruction of the Old South to middle-class apathy in the face of evil. For me it is, first and last, a very good crime novel. Faulkner was way ahead of the Noir game here, and although he openly admitted that the book was written to make money from those who like sensationally lurid stories, it remains a revealing glimpse into the darkness of the human soul.

February 28, 2025 0

HOLY CITY . . . Between the covers

Deputy Will Seems has returned to his home in rural South Virginia after working for ten years in the state capital, Richmond. He finds a place turned in on itself, a place of despair and senseless minor criminality. It’s name? Euphoria County. Will muses on what he sees:

“People around here seemed to live in a cloud of defeat, self-wrought and inherited. Whites had the lost cause, Blacks had slavery. It would seem they should be pitted against each other, but they were really dug in behind the same trench. And the rest of the state, the rest of the country was out there.”

Will attends a house fire he has seen while on patrol and, before the fire crew can get there, he pulls a man from the blaze. The man – Tom Janders – is already dead, but on closer investigation the cause of death is knife wounds. After recovering from smoke inhalation, and leaving the emergency services to do their job, Will finds a man apparently trying to leave the scene and, although he has a deep personal connection to the fugitive – Zeke Hathom – has no alternative but to arrest him. Will’s boss, Sheriff Mills is firmly convinced that Zeke Hathom is the killer, but Will is not certain. What he is certain of is that he must tread carefully. Unknown to anyone else, he is sheltering Sam Hathom, Zeke’s errant son. Sam is wanted for minor criminality, but he also has a drug addiction, and Will is trying to wean him off it. There is a blood bond between Sam and Will. Years ago, when they were in their teens, they were inseparable, but one night they were set upon by a gang of other youths. Sam was beaten within an inch of his life, sustaining permanent facial injuries, but Will was too terrified to help his friend.

Meanwhile, Zeke’s wife has hired a private investigator from Richmond to prove her husband is not the killer. Bennica Watts has been forced into the profession because she was sacked from Richmond police for illegal acquisition of evidence. When she arrives in Euphoria County she is introduced to Will, and he agrees to her posing as his new girlfriend from out out of town while she goes about her work.

Like many other novels set in the American South, in Holy City the past is never far away. It might be the relatively recent past like Will’s youthful friendship with Sam, but ever present, though, is the folk memory, the almost palpable sense of eternal division between Black and White. No matter how many Confederate statues are pulled down the perceived injustice of what happened after Appomattox in April 1865 lingers in the blood of ancestors of the people that erected them, and this is nowhere better described than in William Faulkner’s Intruder In The Dust (click link to read the passage) For Black people, the sense of gross injustice – historical and current – is like a bloodstain that no amount of scrubbing can remove. A quote from this novel, referring to the relationship between Will and Sam, could also refer to the broader cultures into which they were born:

“They were trapped in a shared past.”

A common feature of what has come to be known as Southern Noir is the way the landscape broods and mirrors the sense of loss and resentment felt by the humans who live and work in it. You can find it in novels by William Faulkner, James Lee Burke, Greg Iles and Wiley Cash, to name just four. Henry Wise clearly knows his southern Virginia, and he portrays a land that has history, but whose time has gone. Many former tobacco fields have been abandoned for more saleable crops; the once-abundant flocks of quail have either been shot out of existence or have moved elsewhere; out of town and dotting the dusty highways are houses that look abandoned but may well not be, at least by living humans.

“The trees they saw now seemed grown to die, honed for some miserable end.The occasional building, house, church, trailer, lay unbelievably ravaged by vine and dark growth against the wan green moonlight glinting off the uneven road.They passed a shroud of bubble wrap tangled against a tree.”

Thanks to an audacious gamble by Bennica Watts the murderer of Tom Janders is identified, but although this means Zeke Hathom is eventually exonerated, the case has left numerous casualties, both in the physical sense of blood being spilled but, even more dramatically, the skeletons of the past are, metaphorically, unearthed and their bones bear witness to deeds of utter evil and depravity. This is a beautifully written but dark and dystopian novel, seared by startling moments of genuine pain and sexual violence. There is a flicker of redemption for one group of characters in the novel, but for others, it is as if the past has thrust its withered hand from the grave and swept them down into the depths where it resides. Holy City is published by No Exit Press and is available now.

February 26, 2025 0

THE ANTIQUE HUNTER’S DEATH ON THE RED SEA . . . Between the covers

There’s a backstory to this engaging novel of skullduggery in the international antiques trade, but I’m going to be mean and direct you to my review of the debut novel in the series The Antique Hunter’s Guide To Murder. A few minutes read will explain everything! Now, Freya Lockwood and her eccentric Aunt Carole have inherited the antiques business owned by the late Arthur Crockleford in Little Meddington, Suffolk.

A quick peep at the author’s bio will tell you that she is lucky enough to live in Constable country. The action starts in that idyllic spot, but soon moves further afield. In pursuit of a stolen painting – and involves trying to solve a murder at a little maritime museum in Lowestoft, our two Noble Dames join a specialist antiques lovers cruise sailing from Greece to Jordan. Central to the plot is the existence (or not) of a mysterious antiques crime supremo known as The Collector. The legend has been around for 200 years, so we are not talking about a supernatural being, but more like a criminal version of The Pope, in that a new Collector is elected when the old one dies.

Back in the 1970s the now unjustly forgotten crime novelist Colin Watson wrote a book called Snobbery With Violence, in which he excoriated the Golden Age of crime fiction. The writers, he believed, portrayed a world which, if it ever existed, was totally removed from the humdrum lives acted out by most readers of the genre. As good a writer as he was, I think he missed the point. CL Miller is not setting out to emulated Sayers, Marsh, Allingham or Christie, but she does allow Freya and Caroline to achieve what, for most of us, would be ‘the impossible.’ Freya and Caroline desperately need to join the cruise, so crucial to the plot. In one paragraph, Carole beguiles the flunky at the other end of the phone to let them join the cruise and, with the next call, books flights to Cyprus so that she and Freya can be piped on board the ship. Implausible? Yes, of course it is, but entertaining? Absolutely.

Back to the plot. Freya and Carole blag their way aboard the MVGoldstar as it cruises sedately towards the Red Sea and the ancient ruins of Petra. There is a convention in this kinds of mystery that very few people are who they claim to be, and so it is on the decks and in the luxury restaurants of the ship. Much mayhem ensues, including gunfire echoing around the magnificent ruins of Petra, an FBI agent posing as a member of the ship’s crew, an enigmatic painting which may (or may not) contain a clue to the whereabouts of a priceless Ming vase, and all manner of villainy from people posing as respectable tourists. The book is, of course escapist, but thoroughly engaging, and just the thing to brighten up a drab day in the British winter. It is published by Macmillan, and is available now.

February 24, 2025 0

THE MASKED BAND . . . Between the covers

Two things immediately endeared me to the the main character in the book (a.k.a. the author, I imagine) First, he is a fan of country music, and was quick to reference the divine trio of Emmylou, Dolly and Linda. Second, he is no fan of the more self indulgent excesses of modern jazz. But there’s a good story here, too.

The Okay Boomers are a celebrity amateur rock band. In two ways. Confused? The five-piece outfit are actually media celebs themselves, but they wear masks on stage. Masks of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry and David Bowie. They play a pub gig in the affluent London district of Barnes, and have an ‘after party’ at the mansion owned by one of the band members. When a body is discovered the next morning, dead as can be on the gravel underneath a balcony, DI Garibaldi hops on his bike (literally, as he doesn’t drive) and joins the investigators at the crime scene. The dead body is eventually revealed to be that of Frankie Dunne, an unremarkable young man who – apparently – was completely unknown to any of the Okay Boomers.

Bernard O’Keefe has some sly fun with a couple of the celebrities. There’s Larry Benton, a former footballer turned presenter who sees himself as the champion of middle class liberal sentiments, and Charlie Brougham, the handsome, floppy-haired toff whose boyish charm once graced many a British comedy drama. Hmm. Let me ponder. Who could he have been thinking of?

As you might expect, beneath the veneer of showbiz cameradie, the members of The Masked Band have, in private, little good to think or say about each other. In a rather neat bit of technical business Bernard O’Keeffe has five of the band masks go missing from the crime scene, with the only surviving mask – that of Mick Jagger – placed on the face of the defenestrated corpse, thus placing the latex Bowie, Dylan, Harry and McCartney faces out there in the community and ready to be used and abused.

We know from the brief and enigmatic prologue, that a young man who has drunk well rather than wisely heads of in search of his girlfriend and his missing ‘phone. He arrives at the house where he thinks both are and ….. end of prologue.

Were you to organise a convention of fictional Detective Inspectors you would need something larger than the average town hall. So how does DI Jim Garibaldi measure up? Italian heritage, obviously; lapsed Roman Catholic, parents died together in a road accident – hence his refusal to learn to drive; his marriage broke down, but he has a bond with his son, renewed every time they go to Loftus Road to watch QPR; he is widely read but wears his learning lightly.

Garibaldi is an engaging central character. Like all the best fictional DIs, he is prepared to think outside the box. The quirky copper resolving cases that baffle his senior officers is an oft repeated trope in police procedural novels, but it works well here. The identity of the person responsible for Frankie Dunne’s death does not exactly come out of the blue, but it is cleverly hidden until the final pages. This is a thoroughly engaging police procedural tale with just the right blend of mystery, dry humour and credible characters. The Masked Band is published by the Muswell Press and is out now.

February 24, 2025 0

BYE BYE BABY . . . Between the covers

DI Jack Hawksworth is a rising star in the Metropolitan Police. He is clever, charismatic, and very good looking. His life has not been without tragedy. His parents died in a dreadful road accident, but thanks to a family bequest, he is able to live in an otherwise unaffordable apartment in London’s much sought-after Hampstead. When a man in Lincolnshire is found dead with his hands apparently clutching the remains of his genitals – and his lips – local police soon realise that this is too big for them to handle, and Hawksworth and his team are called in.

The killing is soon repeated in almost identical circumstances, but in Sussex, and it becomes obvious that there is a serial killer at work. The two dead men are linked by where they went to school – an unremarkable High School near Brighton, but what happened back in the day that someone should want to enact such terrible vengeance? Meanwhile, Hawksworth has become romantically involved with a young woman called Sophie who lives in the apartment above his. She suffers from a wasting disease and is mostly wheelchair bound, but she is funny, intelligent, vivacious – and very attractive.

One of Hawksworth’s team, DS Kate Carter is – despite being engaged to an IT expert called Dan – becoming increasingly smitten with her boss, but is trying (and mostly failing) to keep things as professional as possible. Fiona McIntosh invites readers to fall into the same traps as her investigating coppers, and those traps involve us making assumptions, which she delights in overturning. The plot is labyrinthine in its twists and turns, and McIntosh achieves the difficult task of making both the police officers – and us readers – have more than a sneaking sympathy for the killer.

As good as this novel is, in publishing terms it is unusual, in that it was first published in Australia in 2007. It is mildly frustrating that it ends enigmatically, at least in terms of Hawksworth and the serial killer. The follow up novel was Beautiful Death, which is, according to Amazon UK, a steal at just under £60, due to the strange price protocols of the world of publishing! Presumably, Australian readers know what happened next. The author was born in England, but seems to spend much of her time in the beautiful city of Adelaide. I can only say that Bye Bye Baby is a complex and sometimes gruesome read, but a brilliant police thriller. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first in an established series, but UK publishing rights are now with No Exit Press, and this edition is available now.

January 26, 2025 0

ARDEN …Between the covers

This cleverly crafted novel has two timelines. In the first, we follow the fortunes of Alice Arden, nee Brigandine. She is married to Thomas Arden, a Kentish merchant, and we are in the fourth and fifth decades of the sixteenth century, in the dying days of the rule of Henry VIII, and the brief reign of his son, the boy King, Edward VI. A young Warwickshire man, Will Shakspere*, who works as a glove maker in his father’s business, is the second subject. We are in the same century, but in its final two decades. On the throne is the daughter of Ann Boleyn, Elizabeth.

*I have retained the spelling of the surname used in the novel, rather than the modern alternative.

Alice has been married off to Thomas Arden, an unscrupulous merchant who, for all his cut and thrust in the business world, has absolutely no interest in Alice as a sexual partner. Her dismay is compounded by the fact that, before her marriage, she had an intense physical relationship with a local tailor, Tom Mosby. Thomas and Alice have moved to the town of Faversham, where Thomas has been made Mayor. When Mosby turns up and seeks to renew his relationship with Alice, she is drawn into a maelstrom of desire and wrong decisions that will have fatal consequences.

The dissolution of the monasteries, in the later years of the reign of Henry VIII, might be viewed as an act of cultural vandalism today, but for the secular world at the time, it provided endless business opportunities. The monasteries had huge land holdings and when Henry’s Treasury put these acres up for sale, merchants and investors sensed an unmissable business opportunity. Inevitably, rivals clashed, and two such were Thomas Arden and Sir Anthony Aucher. It is no exaggeration to say that they were sworn enemies.

As this rivalry blew hotter and hotter, Arden and his wife had come to an astonishing domestic arrangement. Tom Mosby had reappeared, and had sought out his former lover, Alice. Arden was still dependent on the patronage of Sir Edward North, Alice’s stepfather. Arden reluctantly allowed Alice and Mosby to carry on their passionate affair, metaphorically under his nose, but literally under his roof.

Years on from the events in Faversham, Will Shakspere is increasingly frustrated with his lot. He and his wife Ann and their three children rely on Will’s wage from his father’s glove business. Will is not a great craftsman. Profits are made by making the maximum pairs of gloves from any given hide, and Will botches more often than he succeeds. In a desperate attempt to provide meat for his table and leather for his workshop, Will tries to poach a deer from Charlecote Park, but he is caught by Sir Thomas Lucy’s gamekeepers, and is forced to flee Stratford to avoid serious punishment. He scrapes out a living in London as a bit-part actor, trying his best to send money home to Anne and his children.

The book’s title resonates throughout its pages, but in different ways. It was the dense forest that covered much of what is now the West Midlands in Roman times. It was the family name of Shakspere’s mother. They had once been noble, but had fallen from favour long ago. And of, course, it became Alice’s married name when she and Thomas were wed.

Will eventually makes his mark as a playwright in London, but before works such as The Taming of the Shrew made him rich and famous, he dramatises the events in Faversham fifty years earlier. However, as it contains obvious references to families who are still rich and powerful, it is never performed properly.

Aeschylean tragedy, used by Shakspere in such works as Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, is based on the idea of men and women brought down not because they were inherently evil, but because of poor decisions, ambition, vanity, and human traits like jealousy. Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge is one such and, like him, Thomas Arden comes to grief when he offends one too many local officials and merchants, and loses all his power and authority. Alice Arden, another tragic figure, makes the mistake of trusting her lover, Tom Mosby, and becomes sucked in to a plot to kill her husband. It goes disastrously wrong and, within hours of the deed, she is arrested, thrown into jail, tried and burnt at the stake, but not before she is subject to an astonishingly vile act of revenge by the local authorities. Decades later, Shakspere learns of this and, now a celebrated and wealthy man, is determined to place on record the last hours of Alice Arden’s life.

Arden is beautifully written, with meticulous historical research. Alice Arden is a truly tragic figure, certainly not a heroine, but a woman brought low by her own desires and poor choices. I have not read a book that brings Will Shakspere to life with such energy since Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun. Arden is published by Ginger Cat and is available now.

January 16, 2025 0

THE SERPENT UNDER . . . Between the covers

Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether or not this Sherlock Holmes pastiche is any good, I will tell you that in terms of design and printing, it is to be treasured. The cover is magnificent, and the illustrated capitals at the beginning of each chapter are a delight – each a miniature masterpiece.

To the text. Holmes and Watson receive an urgent summons to Windsor Castle, where a lady-in- waiting to an elderly duchess has been found dead in her bath. Palace officials have peremptorily declared the death as suicide, cleaned the area where the body was found, and moved her remains to another chamber. One glance at the corpse of Miss Jane Wandley is enough for Holmes to realise that she has been murdered. Not only is it impossible that the two slashes on her wrists to have been self administered, she is covered in fresh and unhealed tattoos, depicting an ancient symbol, the Ouroboros – a snake eating itself.

We are reunited with one of the more improbable characters in this series, a young girl known as Heffie, who is an ex-officio member of the Baker Street Irregulars (a staple of the original stories), a gang of street urchins who use their anonymity to eavesdrop on conversations between ladies and gentlemen on London’s highways and byways. They were a brilliant invention by ACD, as they give Holmes eyes and ears in places where he would be too conspicuous to be effective. Heffie is roughly spoken, but highly intelligent and observant. There is just a hint of Pygmalion about this, as Heffie is anxious to speak ‘proper’ as Holmes, in his Henry Higgins mode, corrects her language and pronunciation.

Bonnie MacBride wastes no time in presenting us with a selection of dubious characters. Jane Wandley’s own father will not leave his Home Counties mansion to identify his daughter’s body sending, instead, his estate manager Peter Oliver, a handsome and charismatic university graduate. Jane Wandley’s fiancée, a vulgar and vain German of very minor royal descent, has a cast iron alibi for the probable murder timeline, but is definitely a person of interest.

The key to the mystery lies in the elaborate and professionally executed tattoos on the dead woman. Someone is obviously sending an arcane message, but to whom? And what is the message? Holmes traces the tattoos to the work of a celebrated Japanese artist, much in demand in his home country where his top customers are Yakuza gangsters. However, he was in London at a Japanese cultural event, was kidnapped along with his little daughter and forced to work on Jane Wandley with a knife held to his daughter’s throat. She has been released, but of him there is no sign. Things become more complex when it is discovered that Jane Wandley’s younger brother is an artist who creates designs for an upmarket fabric company. His patterns all feature, guess what? Snakes.

Holmes tributes, pastiches, homages – call them what you will – are almost as old as the original stories. I can cope with most of them, provided they stay in period. Attempts to put him in modern dress, or make him Steampunk, or recast him in a comedy parody, are, for me, beneath contempt. Life shortens by the day, and so I don’t have statistics, but I make an educated guess that SH ‘reimaginings’ probably now outnumber the originals.

I have made this point before, but it is well worth repeating. With the exception of the four novella-length tales, A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear, The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, all other Holmes stories were short and pithy, aimed at magazine readers. Modern novelists are, therefore faced with an inbuilt challenge, which is to keep their stories ticking over throughout 400 pages or so. Hence the need for having other story lines running parallel to the main one – in this case the mystery of who is attempting to damage and disrupt a fledgling women’s rights movement. I have a rather ‘left field” yardstick for these books. If I can imagine Holmes’s dialogue being delivered by Jeremy Brett, then all is well. In The Serpent Under, all is not just well, but flourishing. This is a clever re-imagining of our old friend, and very, very readable. Published by Collins Crime Club, it is available now.