Somehow, I missed this first time round, but reviewed books two and three in this excellent series but Simon Mason. In Ryan Wilkins and Ray Wilkins we met one a rather unusual cop partnership. Ryan is something of a chav, scruffily dressed and with a huge chip on his shoulder. He is, however, very astute. Equally clever, but much more an establishment man, despite his ethnic origin, is black officer Ray. He is a family man, suave and well spoken, and clearly destined for higher things. Their beat is Oxford.
The contrast between the Oxford educated Ray and Ryan, graduate of a seedy South Oxford caravan site (trailer park for American readers) couldn’t be greater. Simon Mason chooses a superb location for their first professional engagement. Barnabus College is where a young woman has been found strangled in the rooms of the college Provost. Ray is all diplomacy and respect, while Ryan, much the more observant, needles the well-to-do members of the college by refusing to grovel at the altar of their social and academic status. It is eventually confirmed that the dead is Syrian, from a wealth family, but due to the political situation, has been forced to earn a living as a porn model. Working as a domestic servant in the college is Ameena Najib, also from Syria, but from a very different background. She is a devout and militant Muslim, and when she is found dead, also strangled, the mystery deepens.
In the background to this murder investigation is civil unrest in the Oxford district of Blackbird Leys. A child has died after being hit by a police car, and protests are violent and bloody. The Leys is a real place, and is a superb example of urban planners concocting idyllic rural names for dire housing estates. I was at Teacher Training College nearby and, trust me, if it was announced the Leys was where you were sent for Teaching Practice, you were not happy.
Simon Mason lets us know, in one of the most scary scenes in the book, why Ryan is so disturbed. Ryan’s wife Michelle died of a drug overdose, leaving him to bring up their little son, also called Ryan. When Ryan senior fails to collect the lad from nursery, the staff phoned one of the contact numbers – that of the little boy’s grandparents. Bad call. They are a disaster. Grandma is, literally, bruised and battered by her feral husband, and when Ryan and Ray break into the shabby caravan on the grim site in South Oxford to rescue the child, all hell breaks loose.
Ryan’s propensity for violence, his unwillingness to ‘play the game’, and his chaotic personal life make it inevitable that he is dismissed from the force. However, his sharp insight into what makes people tick combined with his intuition, enable him to solve the mystery. Ray, despite his initial horror at Ryan’s manner and attitude, keeps the phone line open with his former colleague, and the Barnabus killer is brought to justice.
This is a wonderful read, and I finished it in just a few sessions. My only quibble is that Ryan Wilkins is such an outrageously out-of-kilter character, dressed in his trackies, trainers and baseball cap (back to front, naturally) that it is hard to imagine him making senior rank in the modern police force, which is notorious for signing up to all the latest DEI fads, and renowned for its many acts that seem woker than woke. Simon Mason has created a brilliant – and unique – member of the Cri-Fi Detective Inspector union, and any crime enthusiast who doesn’t enjoy this needs to collect their hat and make for the nearest exit. A Killing In November is published by Riverrun, and is available now.
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.
In Simon Mason’s A Killing In November we met Oxford DI Ryan Wilkins, and the book ended with his dismissal from the force for disciplinary reasons. In this book he is still in Oxford, but working as a security guard/general dogsbody at a van hire firm. His former partner, also named Wilkins, but Ray of that ilk, is now heading up the team that was once Ryan’s responsibility, and it is they who are tasked with investigating the abduction of a little girl from her nursery school.
I am sorry, but that is not how I see this book. Yes, it is set in and around Oxford, but apart from The Broken Afternoon being every bit as good a read as, say, The Silence of Nicholas Quinn or The Remorseful Day, that’s where the resemblance ends. Mason’s book, while perhaps not being Noir in a Derek Raymond or Ted Lewis way, is full of dark undertones, bleak litter strewn public spaces, and the very real capacity for the police to get things badly, badly wrong. Simon Mason (right) has created coppers who certainly don’t spend melancholy evenings gazing into pints of real ale and then sit home alone listening to Mozart while sipping a decent single malt.
Oxford, 1895. The spires may well be dreaming, but for Anthony Jardine, Fellow of St Gabriel’s College, the nightmare is just beginning. His drug addicted wife is found stabbed to death, slumped in the corner of a horse tram carriage. His mourning is shattered when his mistress is also found dead – murdered in the house she shares with her elderly eccentric husband. With a background story of an archaeological discovery threatening to shake the English religious establishment to its very roots, Inspector James Antrobus must avoid the temptation to make Jardine a swift and easy culprit. Helped by the uncanny perception of Sophia Jex-Blake, a pioneering woman doctor, Antrobus finds the answer to the killings lies in London, just forty miles away on the railway.
Norman Russell (right) is a writer and academic, who has had fifteen novels published. He is an acknowledged authority on Victorian finance and its reflections in the literature of the period, and his book on the subject, The Novelist and Mammon, was published by Oxford University Press in 1986. He is a graduate of Oxford and London Universities. After military service in the West Indies, he became a teacher of English in a large Liverpool comprehensive school, where he stayed for twenty-six years, retiring early to take up writing as a second career.
fullybooked2017 