London
Success was something of a double-edged sword for MO HAYDER with her début novel Birdman: the book enjoyed astonishing sales, but called down a fearsome wrath on the author for unflinchingly entering the blood-boltered territory of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter books. Part of the fuss was clearly to do with the fact that a woman writer had handled scenes of horror and violence so authoritatively, and there was little surprise when the subsequent The Treatment provoked a similar furore. Actually, it’s a remarkably vivid and meticulously detailed shocker: less grimly compelling than its predecessor, perhaps, but still a world away from the cosy reassurance of much current crime fiction. In a shady south London residential street, a husband and wife are found tied up, the man near death. Both have been beaten and are suffering from acute dehydration. DI Jack Caffery of the Met’s murder squad AMIP is told to investigate the disappearance of the couple’s son, and, as he uncovers a series of dark parallels with his own life, he finds it more and more difficult to make the tough decisions necessary to crack a scarifying case. As in Birdman, Caffery is characterised with particular skill, and Hayder is able (for the most part) to make us forget the very familiar cloth he’s cut from. The personal involvement of a cop in a grim case is an over-familiar theme, but it’s rarely been dispatched with the panache and vividness on display here.
Is there anyone else in the crime genre currently writing anything as quirky and idiosyncratic as CHRISTOPHER FOWLER’s Bryant and May series? (And let’s disabuse readers of the mistaken notion that this is a historical series, as many seem to think – it wouldn’t be in this book if it were.) Fowler eschews all recognisable genres, though the cases for his detective duo have resonances of the darker corners of British Golden Age fiction. In Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart, the Peculiar Crimes Unit is handed a typically outlandish case in which two teenagers have seen a corpse apparently stepping out of its grave – with one of them subsequently dying in a hit-and-run accident. Arthur Bryant is stimulated by the bizarreness of the case but is tasked with finding out who has made away with the ravens from the Tower of London. (Not an insignificant crime, as it is well known that when the ravens leave the Tower, Britain itself will fall.) The usual smorgasbord of grotesque incident and stygian humour is on offer, and if you aren’t already an aficionado, I suggest you find out what the fuss is about before the forthcoming television series clinically removes Fowler’s individual tone of voice.
It is both a virtue and a curse when one doesn’t require a great deal of sleep. Sometimes – when I’m wide awake in the wee small hours with only the sound of urban foxes outside my window suggesting something else is alive – I feel that I’d prefer to be like ordinary people who need eight hours’ shuteye. But here’s the virtue of this unusual state: it gives one ample time to catch up with all the writers one wants to read; sometimes they are old favourites, sometimes new discoveries. And – a real pleasure – sometimes in these nocturnal explorations I encounter the work of a writer who (while moving in familiar waters) demonstrates an innovative and quirky imagination, transforming narratives with whose accoutrements we’re familiar. Debut writer SARAH HILARY was most decidedly in that category, and even though her character DI Marnie Rome may initially appear to owe something to other female coppers (Lynda La Plante’s Tennison, for example), Marnie turns out to be very much her own woman – as is Hilary herself, with her crisp and direct style.
In Someone Else’s Skin, DI Rome is dispatched to a woman’s shelter with her partner DS Noah Jake. Lying stabbed on the floor is the husband of one of the women from the shelter. Rome finds herself opening the proverbial can of worms, and a slew of dark secrets will be exposed before a final violent confrontation in a kitchen. As well as functioning as a well-honed police procedural, this is very much a novel of character – DI Rome in particular is strikingly well realised, and even such issues as domestic abuse are responsibly incorporated into the fabric of the novel. Someone Else’s Skin is a book that hits the ground running, and readers will be keen to see more of the tenacious Marnie Rome.
With SJ WATSON’s Before I Go To Sleep, British publishing saw something of a phenomenon. Watson may have borrowed the book’s central premise from Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (memory-deprived protagonist struggling to make sense of their life), but the assurance with which he finessed his narrative belied his inexperience and rivalled that of such old hands as Robert Harris. Watson’s follow-up novel in 2015 was Second Life.
The refreshingly forthright STELLA DUFFY has made a success of several careers: in the theatre, in broadcasting and as the creator of a variety of books in different genres (including the historical field). As with the earlier work of Val McDermid, Duffy’s protagonist is a lesbian, the private investigator Saz Martin, who has been put through her paces in such tautly written, quirky novels as Fresh Flesh. There is a social agenda behind the books, but never at the expense of the exigencies of strong, persuasive storytelling.
For some time now, MARK BILLINGHAM’s lean and gritty urban thrillers featuring DI Tom Thorne have been massive commercial successes. And such books as In the Dark, a standalone novel in which Thorne makes only a cameo appearance, demonstrate that Billingham can make trenchant comments about British society while never neglecting his ironclad narrative skills. Billingham, who has a background in stand-up comedy, has quoted some interesting statistical findings in his talks to book groups: many women would rather spend time reading a thriller than having sex. Billingham appears to be bemused by this statistic, but (if the truth were told) the author himself is part of the problem: his crime novels are undoubtedly a source of pure enjoyment (without the bother of having to take off one’s clothes), although thrillers such as Lifeless are journeys into the most disturbing aspects of the human psyche. It’s interesting that Billingham’s books have a reputation for extreme violence, because they deal more in atmosphere – a real sense of dread is quietly conveyed to the reader.
In Buried, ex-DCI Mullen, a retired police officer, is distressed when his son disappears. Is he the victim of a kidnapping? Tom Thorne begins his inquiry by seeking everyone who might have a score to settle with the boy’s father. And he discovers something intriguing: Mullen has not mentioned the person who would appear to be the prime suspect – a man who had once made threats against Mullen and his family and who, moreover, is under suspicion for another killing. Billingham always does considerable research for his books to ensure the authenticity of his police detail, but he was obliged to make up some of the procedural aspects here as the Met is particularly secretive on the issue of kidnapping. Billingham avoids the obvious set pieces that can instantly pique the reader’s attention, and ensures that Thorne’s encounter with evil is handled in a dispassionate fashion, even though Thorne himself is less strongly characterised than usual in this, his sixth outing. The recent Time of Death (the thirteenth Thorne) is Billingham on top form.
LAURA WILSON’s work bristles with some of the best crime writing in the UK – she is one of the country’s most searching psychological novelists working in the genre. There are also ghosts of one of Wilson’s favourite novelists, Patrick Hamilton, in the luminous and richly detailed conjuring of the London of various eras in her books. Wilson has never been happy staying within the parameters of the conventional crime novel, and in My Best Friend she deploys a device whereby the novel is narrated by three strongly delineated protagonists. Her most recent work features her sympathetic copper Ted Stratton, while one of her most accomplished books is 2015’s contemporary (non-Stratton) The Wrong Girl.
Many well-heeled TV presenters face a variety of pitfalls that could sabotage their comfortable lives: a messy divorce, inconvenient revelations about their private life. But Gaby Mortimer, heroine of SABINE DURRANT’s Under Your Skin, finds something more sinister to threaten her equilibrium. When running on the common near her London house, she discovers the body of a woman lying in the brambles, the victim of a savage strangling. But what Gaby is not expecting is the fact that she is to become the principal suspect for the crime. (The murder victim was wearing Gaby’s T-shirt, and ever more damning evidence begins to point in her direction.) The police appear to be convinced of Gaby’s guilt, but despite this, she tries to keep her life on track. But as many a TV personality (and politician) has found, it’s virtually impossible to carry on with the day job when you are under scrutiny by reporters, and all around people regard you with suspicion. Things can only get worse – and they do, to the extent that Gaby begins to doubt her own sanity. But then an attractive journalist called Jack appears, apparently believing in Gaby’s innocence and ready to help. Gaby’s troubles, however, are only just beginning. Durrant has written for teenage girls, but there is absolutely nothing adolescent about this strikingly constructed and economically written thriller, a book that steadily draws the reader into the plight of its besieged heroine and springs a variety of surprises – surprises we are unable to second-guess. And both male and female readers find it easy to identify with Gaby, with the underpinnings of her life relentlessly pulled away. In fact, she is the kind of woman in extreme situations that Nicci French used to write about before turning to a series character, and Under Your Skin has all the authority of the best novels by French. Durrant’s treatment of the characters’ psychology is, admittedly, straightforward rather than nuanced, but that strategy ensures that the inexorable grip never slackens. Let’s hope that she continues to spend her time writing for adults: we need thriller writers who can reinvigorate the genre – and it looks like Durrant may be able to do just that.
The amazing – and immediate – success of MARTINA COLE’s crime novels must be a source of despair to those writers who have struggled for years. Right from the start, she has enjoyed reader approval for her distinctive, gritty fiction. Even the workaday TV adaptations of Dangerous Lady and The Jump merely brought more kudos her way (she’s been less lucky than Colin Dexter in her transfer to the screen – but with her sales, she should worry). In Broken, a child is abandoned in a deserted stretch of woodland and another on the top of a derelict building. DI Kate Burrows makes the inevitable connections, and when one child dies, she finds herself up against a killer utterly without scruples. Her lover Patrick offers support in this troubling case, but he is under pressure himself. A body is found in his Soho club, and Patrick is on the line as a suspect. And Kate begins to doubt him… In prose that is always trenchant, Cole delivers the goods throughout this lengthy and ambitious narrative. Kate is an exuberantly characterised heroine, and the sardonic Patrick enjoys equally persuasive handling from the author. The Good Life – which Cole has certainly earned the right to enjoy – continued her run of bestsellers (as did, most recently, Get Even).
Speaking to MICK HERRON, I learned about his adept use of London locations. ‘I rarely choose locations: research averse, I’ve found that my novels tend to be set in the areas I frequently inhabit. Silicon Roundabout is a whirling dervish of a road junction that comes into its own on winter afternoons, when dark arrives early, and the advertising hoardings scream out their video messages above the red and white kaleidoscope made by furious traffic. Few things are as irresistibly noir as neon. It’s like glitter laid on grime; a cheap makeover that only looks good as long as the light is bad. So it’s round here that I have Tom Bettany wander in Nobody Walks: unkempt and haggard, carrying his dead son’s ashes in a bag, he circles the streets looking for drug dealers among those who haunt the bars and bop the night away. What he finds isn’t quite what he thought he was looking for, but that too is an aspect of noir – that you can’t avoid the fate that awaits you, whichever streets you choose to wander down.’ Herron’s 2016 novel Real Tigers has received enthusiastic early notices.
Perhaps because of a reaction against what detractors called the laddish fiction of TONY PARSONS (although he clearly had complex strategies in play in his examination of sex and relationships), the writer has recently taken a new direction, reinventing himself in The Murder Bag as a pugnacious crime writer – although even in this new venture he has encountered resistance. If you are shell-shocked from the army of novels featuring tough maverick cops – and are convinced that nothing new can invigorate the genre – perhaps you should pick up The Murder Bag. Yes, we’ve met detectives at loggerheads with their daughters (as here) before, from Wallander to Rebus. But there are two things that instantly lift this one out of the rut: parenting is a speciality of the author’s work and it’s treated with a nuance largely absent elsewhere in crime fiction. And Parsons, a quintessential London writer, evokes his city with pungency. Bolshie DC Max Wolfe is investigating a homicide in which a banker’s throat has been cut; a second victim is a homeless heroin addict. The connection: an upscale private school. This first crime novel was followed by The Slaughter Man.
LYNDA LA PLANTE – the creator of Prime Suspect – is a woman of conviction. Many things clearly make her blood boil – not least the way in which she perceives this country’s justice system as being heavily weighted on the side of the criminal rather than the victim, and the ease with which violent sexual offenders can work the system and be back on the streets in a derisorily short time. Authors frequently remind us that the views of their characters are not necessarily their own, but after reading a typical La Plante novel there can be little doubt that it’s the author’s persuasive (and often incendiary) views that leap off the page – not least because they are espoused in the book not just by the unsympathetic misogynist coppers, but also by the driven DCI James Langton and even La Plante’s vulnerable but tough heroine DI Anna Travis.
In Clean Cut, Langton is in pursuit of a truly nasty group of illegal immigrants who have murdered a young prostitute. Then Langton himself is viciously slashed in the chest and leg with a machete and hospitalised – with the prospect of his police career coming to an end. Langton is conducting a clandestine affair with another detective, DI Anna Travis, who has a similarly daunting load on her shoulders: a fierce commitment to the job, battles with boneheaded colleagues, and a readiness to place herself in highly dangerous situations. But her biggest problem is her fractious relationship with the withholding Langton – difficult enough in his selfishness and lack of commitment before he is brutally wounded, but almost insufferable as he concentrates his frustration on Anna whenever she visits his nursing home. She is working on another, related case in which the body of a woman has been found sexually assaulted and mutilated – and soon Travis and Langton are up against something far more sinister than squalid people trafficking (involving voodoo, torture and a truly monstrous villain).
There are various factors that ensure Clean Cut is a visceral read: the assured plotting, the pithy heroine (we’re always on Anna’s side, even though we are irritated by her desperate reliance on a man who treats her so badly), and the poisonous secret that the heroine is left with at the end of the book. But it’s La Plante’s passionate conviction (burnt into the pages) that society has become the hostage of criminals that really gives the book its charge. In 2015, we were given a glimpse into the early professional life of La Plante’s signature character with Tennison, tied into a new TV adaptation.
The inaugural novel in a new series of London-set thrillers by a then-new (now established) British writer had all the hallmarks of staying power. SIMON KERNICK’s The Business of Dying showed that the author meant business; and the plotting is as cogent as you’ll find this side of the Atlantic. DS Dennis Milne is a maverick copper with a speciality sideline in killing drug-dealing criminals. But everything goes wrong for him when (acting on some bad advice) he kills two straight customs officers and an accountant. At the same time, he is investigating the brutal murder of an 18-year-old working girl, found with her throat ripped open by Regent’s Canal, and his probing leads him towards other police officers. Soon, it’s up for grabs as to whether Milne will go down for his own illegal dealings before he cracks a case that is steeped in blood and corruption. Since this debut, Kernick has rarely failed to deliver tough and authentic storytelling in book after book. Another theme of that first novel was the transitoriness of so much that we hold dear in life (ironically, even before the novel was published, two of the three Kings Cross gas rings that adorned the hardback jacket were swept away by Eurostar… nothing is permanent, as Kernick’s rugged novel argued).
The unvarnished writing of DAVID LAWRENCE gleaned much praise; both The Dead Sit Round in a Ring and Nothing Like the Night demonstrated that a gritty talent had appeared on the crime genre. Initial success, of course, can be a double-edged sword, but Lawrence showed no sign of faltering, and Cold Kill had the same steely assurance as its predecessors. When a woman’s body is found in a London park, DS Stella Mooney finds herself involved. Robert Kimber confesses to the murder; his flat appears to reveal all the apparatus of a killer, with its photos of young women and grim text written about each of them. Other murders, equally savage, seem to be down to him, but Stella is not convinced. Is someone else manipulating the disturbed Kimber? All of this is handled with the forcefulness we have come to expect from Lawrence, with Stella Mooney as fully rounded a protagonist as ever. And if revelations in the plotting owe something to Thomas Harris, Lawrence is hardly alone in drawing water from that particular much-visited well. Nevertheless, he remains his own man, and Cold Kill is authoritatively gripping. Early success, however, was not followed up.
ANDREW MARTIN (a man who does not hesitate to say exactly what he means on any occasion) may be well known for his award-winning historical crime series featuring railway detective Jim Stringer, but he had hankered to write a novel about the super-rich, partly in the hope (he noted) that it might make him at least slightly rich. And while people are fascinated by the moneyed, he hadn’t noticed many crime novels on the subject. It might be asked: why would the super-rich resort to crime? They would need a very good reason. And Martin set himself other challenges. The super-rich of London are mainly foreign, and he has succeeded in getting those voices – specifically Russian ones – right. Martin’s approach to multiculturalism, which he decided to take on after spending many years imaginatively inhabiting the mono-cultural world of Edwardian Britain, is provocative. The Yellow Diamond concerns an imaginary unit of the Metropolitan Police set up to monitor the super-rich of London. It’s based in dowdy Down Street, at the ‘wrong’ end of Mayfair. A principal character is a woman in her fifties, Victoria Clifford, who was the waspish personal assistant to the senior detective who set up the unit. However, he was rendered comatose by a bullet soon afterwards, and Clifford must find out why he was attacked.
Many of us have had friends who seem relentlessly bound on self-destruction – and not just by the time-honoured route of drink or drug abuse. The loss of their job is the inevitable corollary – but how do we save those friends, when anything we say sounds hollow or sanctimonious? The trick of NICCI FRENCH’s highly persuasive Catch Me When I Fall is to embody such notions in the reckless protagonist, Holly, who risks her happy marriage and successful career by venturing into dangerous terra incognita: alcohol-fuelled semi-orgies, where she risks brutal beatings, and wakes up from her stupor to find she’s been having sex with some highly unsuitable partners – one of whom breaks out of the confines of her alternative existence and threatens her fragile everyday life. But there’s an intriguing sleight of hand at work here: while the reader might be tempted to metaphorically shake Holly by the shoulders and suggest she gets her act together, French makes such a comfortable distancing impossible by involving us in Holly’s increasingly nightmarish life. We’re forced to lose our objectivity, and we find ourselves taking on Holly’s guilty actions as part of our own response to the book. The ‘transference of guilt’ theme was a speciality of Alfred Hitchcock, but nothing that the director made could match the positive riot of guilt transference that decorates the pages of Catch Me When I Fall: Holly’s best friend/business partner Meg is ineluctably drawn into the chaos of her life, as are Holly’s husband and various other characters in the novel, including a sympathetic male, Stuart, who unwisely confides to her his problems with premature ejaculation. And, finally, there’s the guilt dumped on the reader, obliged to take on the consequences of Holly’s actions, whether we want to or not. The novel, like so much of French’s work, hardly makes for a comfortable read. ‘Nicci French’ is, of course, the personally engaging husband-and-wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, and this book, more than most of their work, poses some intriguing gender-related questions about the duo’s division of labour: a female protagonist, as ever, but initially the lack of balanced male figures is worrying. In fact, the preponderance of brutal, weak or drippily complaisant males suggests another author named French – Marilyn – and The Women’s Room (with its simple antithesis of female=good, male=bad), but Nicci French is much too sophisticated a writer for that, and some of the men – even those with less-than-honourable motives – are shown to be victims as much as Holly. Is this Sean French putting in tuppence for the male sex? We’ll never know, as the couple rigorously avoid telling who does what. And who cares when the results are as dexterous and edgy as this?
More recent work involves a series protagonist, therapist Dr Frieda Klein, who first appeared in Blue Monday. In Tuesday’s Gone, a social worker, Maggie, calls on the disturbed Michelle Doyce, a ‘care in the community’ patient. Maggie is struck by the smell and the squalor – hardly new experiences for her – but she is not prepared for the man sitting in a back room, whose blue marbled appearance is that of a corpse. Frieda Klein is dragooned into the case by her colleague DCI Karlsson, and the dead man is identified as confidence trickster Robert Poole. Klein and Karlsson soon encounter an army of the dead man’s unlucky ‘marks’ – and Frieda discovers that whoever is responsible for the death of Poole has her in their sights. Solid, assured work, if less distinctive than their memorable standalones.
ALI KNIGHT’s artfully constructed crime novels are set in London, with the recent Until Death a persuasive entry; it is a domestic noir thriller set mainly in the penthouse on top of St Pancras station. From every window of this gothic architectural masterpiece, the dynamism, bustle and freedom of London can always be seen, contrasting chillingly with the claustrophobia and secrets of the family who live there.
It took some time, but FRANCES FYFIELD has now acquired something close to the literary gravitas of the two late British Queens of Crime (and habitués of the House of Lords), Mesdames Ruth Rendell and PD James. Fyfield is now regularly identified as one of the heirs of a great tradition, and books such as Staring at the Light have mined the same vein of psychological acuity and dark menace as those of her fellow authors. Fyfield said to me that the ideal locale for a story is a small community where everyone thinks they know everything about one another, while really they miss the obvious. This is a key notion in all her books: nothing is quite what it seems. And – like all the best crime writers – her books aren’t just about keeping us glued to the chair while our cocoa goes cold; they often have something pertinent to say about the human condition (though never in any po-faced fashion).
Fyfield’s novels featuring Crown Prosecutor Helen West and DCS Geoffrey Bailey have built up a steady following, but more recent books take Fyfield’s customary delving into the darker aspects of the human psyche to a new level of intensity – and that’s very much the case with The Art of Drowning. Dedicated male readers of the author (and they are many – Fyfield’s fiefdom is by no means an exclusively female one) have been a little unsettled by her recurring theme of male violence against women, and some of the men in The Art of Drowning are as distasteful a group of males as she has created. Such as Rachel Doe’s lover, whom she discovers to be both a thief and a liar. Looking at her life (and not liking what she sees), Rachel tries a new tack: an art class, where she falls under the spell of ex-model Ivy Wiseman. Ivy is good company, having survived drug addiction, the death of her child and the loss of her home, and, like Rachel, she’s a casualty of the sex war. When the women visit Ivy’s parents, who have an idyllic, slightly rundown place near the sea, she begins to find true peace again with her new friends. Then she is told of the death of Ivy’s daughter, who died by drowning. And she hears about the unpleasant Carl, Ivy’s ex-husband (a lawyer), who her parents want to track down. Rachel decides to help them find him – but when she meets the sinister Carl, everything she had expected proves to be subtly off-kilter. She finds herself desperately out of her depth, and soon discovers that a savage internecine war within a family is not a good place to be. As ever with Fyfield, the characters here are indelibly etched – everyone from the vulnerable Rachel to the ambiguous people under whose spell she falls is drawn with tremendous vividness. And the plotting! If you feel that your unwritten novel will take the world by storm, don’t pick up The Art of Drowning; you may be discouraged from setting fingers to keyboard.
In Hunted, EMLYN REES has produced a novel that will have you holding your breath throughout – possibly to the detriment of your health. Danny Shanklin comes to consciousness in a London hotel room he’s unfamiliar with. He’s dressed in a balaclava and a red tracksuit. On the floor is a faceless corpse – and Shanklin has a high-powered rifle strapped to his hands. Hearing the sound of sirens, he looks out of the window and sees a burning car and more bodies littering the street. This is the powerful opening to a truly kinetic piece of crime/thriller fiction, in which the stakes are always set at the highest level.
You’re a highly successful writer of children’s books featuring a kind of junior James Bond. Does this have you chafing at the bit, keen to cram an adult book with all the sex and violence you can’t put into your books for a youthful audience? ANTHONY HOROWITZ’s first novel for adults, The Killing Joke, gave older readers a chance to see whether the author had less sanitised entertainment up his sleeve.
Horowitz grew up tended by servants in his family’s London mansion, the scion of a well-heeled Jewish family. As he has remarked, his childhood was deeply unhappy – and it’s an upbringing he brought to scarifying life in such autobiographical books as Granny. He made a mark as a children’s author with his Alex Rider novels; the adventures of Horowitz’s youthful spy have sold over a million copies in this country alone. But this is only one string to his bow: his screenplay The Gathering has been filmed, and his TV scriptwriting includes the BAFTA-winning Foyle’s War.
The auguries were good for The Killing Joke, his first un-child-friendly novel. This is a scorchingly funny black comedy thriller in which none-too-successful actor Guy Fletcher overhears a sick joke about his estranged mother, a well-known actress, in a Finsbury Park pub. He ill-advisedly objects to the joke-teller – a brutal cockney builder – and is floored by a headbutt for his objections. This starts Guy on a bizarre odyssey to discover where all jokes originate – and, yes, there is one source, which Guy discovers – while putting his life in considerable danger. There is a real sense here of an author stretching his wings after the constraints of writing for children – the humour is very dark. Not that such territory is off limits for kids these days; a sex scene in a fairground, however, is another matter. Guy and his companion Sally force their way into a closed funhouse and enjoy each other on a carpet of plastic balls, while distorting mirrors reflect a grotesque (and very funny) version of the erotic cavortings. The humour in The Killing Joke is laugh-out-loud stuff, and Guy is a sympathetic hero; if what he finds at the end of his quest for the source of jokes is something of a let-down after the brilliantly sustained, tortuous plotting that precedes it, most readers will feel they’ve had more than their money’s worth. Moving away from humour, recent work has been in the area of Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming pastiches.
ERIN KELLY has written a variety of novels of psychological suspense, of which The Burning Air is perhaps the most disturbing – and also the one that lays out most clearly the corrosive areas she moves in. Her first two books, The Sick Rose and The Poison Tree, borrowed titles from William Blake, but The Burning Air takes on most tellingly Blake’s line about a destructive and dark secret love.
It is a family tradition for the MacBrides to visit Devon each Bonfire Night, but there is a pall over the latest gathering. The matriarch of the family, Lydia, is dead. Her husband, the customarily sober Rowan (a retired headmaster), is drinking himself into a stupor. The family is in meltdown, with the eldest daughter Sophie watching her marriage crumble, while grandson Jake (who is mixed race) has the police breathing down his neck. But there is one ray of optimism: Felix, Sophie’s brother, has brought along his beautiful new girlfriend Kerry, who charms the unhappy family. She appears to be a natural babysitter, and Sophie leaves her baby daughter in her care. But both Kerry and the baby disappear. Has she abducted the baby? Or have both of them been taken? The distraught Sophie turns on her brother, claiming that the missing girl could – for all they know – be some kind of psychopathic monster. And the truth, when it arrives, is shocking.
When even the best writers of standalone novels of suspense are obliged to observe commercial imperatives and adopt continuing characters (most recently, for instance, Nicci French), one can only hope that the talented Kelly is not persuaded by her publisher to write about a series protagonist, be they damaged male detective or alcoholic female forensics specialist. Not that there isn’t plenty of damage at the heart of this book – Blake’s ‘invisible worm’ has been doing his worst in the MacBride family – but the balancing of the very different characters has an intensity similar to that of chamber music, with each player proving as crucial as the last the author has presented for our attention. If Erin Kelly has not quite attained the rarefied psychological astuteness of a Barbara Vine (and if the final revelation is a touch underwhelming), she has proved herself to be among the most accomplished and pin-sharp of writers at work in the crime genre, with family dysfunction a speciality. And William Blake can continue to be a source of appropriate future titles: ‘Cruelty has a human heart’? ‘Hire a villain’?
When the anodyne TV presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan announced some time ago that they were to emulate Oprah Winfrey’s book club on their TV show, ironic noises were heard from the publishing trade – how could the British duo have the same seismic ‘Oprah effect’ on book sales? WILLIAM BRODRICK is a man who knows how wrong the naysayers were. The sales of his The Sixth Lamentation leapt through the roof and highlighted a mystery writer of panache. But without an R&J plug, how would Brodrick’s subsequent books fare? Were enough people seduced by that debut novel to make The Gardens of the Dead another success? As with the first book, Brodrick is primarily concerned with plotting. And his second concern after plotting is… more plotting. This isn’t to say that the characters here are not fully rounded; it’s just that Brodrick is clearly persuaded that we all want to be transfixed by storytelling expertise.
Elizabeth Glendinning is a QC who knows that her death is imminent. But she has a pressing agenda – she will bring a guilty man, now free, back into the law courts. The plan that will take effect after her death involves six individuals, all of whose lives were changed by a significant trial. Elizabeth’s posthumous plan is that Graham Riley will be arraigned by this group, led by the monk Father Anselm. Anselm receives the key to a security box that will bring back memories for him of his days as a barrister when a witness destroyed the case against Riley and it collapsed. This witness, George Bradshaw, found his life ruined after these events, and wanders London as Blind George, his short-term memory in pieces after an assault. However, Elizabeth’s carefully oiled planning begins to break down, and Anselm finds himself unwillingly taking on her mantle, investigating Elizabeth’s life (and that of her son, Nick). And there’s an urgency to these investigations: lives are at stake…
Any fears that Brodrick’s earlier book was a lucky accident were quickly allayed with The Gardens of the Dead. Certainly, the complexity of the narrative here is a little wearying at times. But as this labyrinthine tale unfolds, Brodrick is able to bring off a truly impressive feat: while we read on, agog for the next revelation, it becomes apparent that we’re being treated to character studies quite as rich as those in many a more ostensibly ‘literary’ novel.
Are novels supposed to make us feel elated? Or is it acceptable to feel guilty and soiled, identifying with a character who colludes in the murder of a woman after some sordid group sex? If you feel the second option is one you’d rather avoid, you’d better steer clear of NEIL CROSS’s Burial. Such is the author’s insidious skill (he is the creator of TV’s Luther) that we are ineluctably involved in the messy private life of Nathan, a rather sad loser, whether we like it or not. The experience may make us feel a bit queasy, but it’s possible to argue (as Cross might in defence of his scarifying, deeply disturbing novel) that the reader might experience a scrubbed-with-a-brush scourging after reading Burial – not necessarily a pleasant sensation, but certainly energising. As in such previous books as Holloway Falls, Cross marries literary values to the exigencies of a page-turning crime narrative – but that’s ‘literary’ with a small ‘l’. No flourishes here: everything is pared to the bone. Nathan, stifled in a radio journalism job and in the last phases of a disintegrating relationship, attends a party given by his right-wing radio host boss, and meets the slightly deranged Bob. After some ill-advised, cocaine-fuelled (and deeply squalid) three-way sex with Bob and a stoned young girl in a car, the girl – Elise – ends up dead. An accident? Bob was the last person in the car with her. The traumatised Nathan is persuaded to bury the body, enduring agonies of guilt as a result. But then Bob reappears in his life and tells him that the woods in which they buried Elise are about to be dug up for a housing estate. Nathan is soon making one catastrophic decision after another, with (inevitably) a macabre outcome.
It’s easier for an author to invite identification when a protagonist has certain attractive moral or physical qualities – we can all happily imagine we’re ‘featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d’, but it’s a more complex achievement to put us inside the skin of a no-hoper like Nathan. That’s just what Cross does. When Nathan initiates a relationship with the unknowing, damaged sister of the girl in whose death he is implicated, the reader is squirming – both at his colossal misjudgement, and in fervent hope that he won’t be found out. There are those who won’t thank Neil Cross for taking us into such morally ambivalent territory, but even those feeling a little grubby won’t be able to deny the author’s sheer mastery of his unsettling task.
The divisions between the tough, streetwise British thrillers and the so-called Home Counties ‘cosies’ are much talked about, but certain books refuse to fit comfortably into either category. There is no denying, however, that Cross’s earlier Holloway Falls is very scabrous stuff indeed: hard-edged and sardonically funny, this is not for those who like their thrillers to be a tad more relaxing. At the centre of Cross’s uncompromising narrative is dysfunctional copper Bill Holloway, who fills his loneliness by having sex with prostitute Joanne Chapman (and asking her to dress up as his divorced wife). Then two postal deliveries shock him out of his lethargy: a video recording of his wife and her lover engaged in sex, then one of Joanne tied up and terrified, a gag over her mouth…
Many people (to their regret) have incautiously said yes to a friend’s invitation to a stag or hen night. They can be pretty grisly occasions, but thankfully few of them have the grim consequences of the gathering in RUTH WARE’s In a Dark, Dark Wood. Ware’s central character Leonora (who narrates the novel) finds that there is a price to be paid for deviating from her generally antisocial behaviour when she accepts such an invitation. The event brings up betrayals and guilt from the past, which, in a Frank Lloyd Wright-style house in an isolated forest, prove to be a recipe for catastrophe. While functioning as an exemplary crime novel, there is much keenly observed social comedy here (not a million miles from the acerbic work of William Trevor), and spiky characterisation is a particularly strong suit for Ware. Crime readers may have more than enough on their plates, but there is no ignoring this provocative writer.
Having established itself as boasting one of the most striking and provocative translated crime lists in the UK, the publisher Quercus felt obliged to keep up the momentum it had created, adding British writers to its impressive geographical spread. Which it certainly did with Brit writer ELENA FORBES’ strong and assured debut Die With Me. The hallmark of this one is psychological acuity, as persuasive here as in such experienced names as Ruth Rendell and Sophie Hannah. It’s assumed that the young girl found dead in a London church has committed suicide – but DI Mark Tartaglia isn’t convinced. He finds that other suicides had presented the same features, but the inevitable clashes with authority and colleagues interpose themselves between Tartaglia and the grim truth. Forbes’ novel provided the auguries of a long and successful crime-writing career to come. Her later Evil in Return touched on the well-worn theme of the past erupting into the present – a notion to which she brought something fresh.
Why did MICHAEL DOBBS waste his time as Deputy Chairman of both the Conservative Party and Saatchi and Saatchi? Or the myriad other jobs he’s taken up over the years? He was clearly put on this earth to write thrillers of the most shamelessly page-turning quality – such as The Lords’ Day, in which Dobbs addresses himself to the classic ‘ticking clock’ narrative, and screws the accelerating tension so tight that most readers will be consuming this one in just two or three sittings.
It’s a year or so in the future: the State Opening of Parliament, with the Queen, her Cabinet and visitors gathering in the House of Lords. Suddenly, all is panic and confusion – the violent intervention of fundamentalist terrorists will make this day one to be remembered, for all the wrong reasons. In the best cinematic fashion, Dobbs cuts between a large cast of characters, marshalling the tension with a canny touch. There is ex-soldier Harry Jones, trying to persuade his estranged wife not to have an abortion and struggling with a failing career; there are the sons of the British Prime Minister and the (female) President of the United States (who could Dobbs have based his American head of state upon?); there are the squabbling politicians (some nicely acid roman-à-clef portraits here); and there are the terrorists, masquerading as cleaners to bring carnage into the heart of government. Here, Dobbs is particularly adroit at conveying the mindset of young men psyching themselves into theocratic fervour. And apart from the beleaguered Harry Jones, struggling with a grim hostage situation, some of Dobbs’ most successful characterisations are those of real-life characters, including, audaciously, the Queen and Prince Charles. As a Kalashnikov is discharged in the House of Lords, shattering the canopy above the throne and causing panic, Dobbs has his royals behaving in a very plausible way – the Queen grasps Charles’ arm as he tries to put himself between her and the gunmen – she realises that if they had intended to kill her, they would have already done so. All of this is handled with the panache we expect from Dobbs (despite some careless passages), and he still allows himself some cogent observations on the British – such as the fact that we allow our culture, and with it our self-confidence, to slip through our fingers, leaving us little but empty air.
Now that the secret is out – and we know it is Harry Potter’s creator JK Rowling behind the masculine sobriquet ‘ROBERT GALBRAITH’ – we are all obliged to play catch-up with a book that created barely a ripple on its first pseudonymous appearance. So: was The Cuckoo’s Calling any good? After all, Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, incurred a decidedly mixed critical response, despite its prodigious sales.
In fact, the first Galbraith book is an accomplished piece that thoroughly deserves its retrospective success, even were it not by a celebrity author. As the beleaguered military policeman-turned-private eye Cormoran Strike investigates the apparent suicide of a supermodel, we are granted a measured but subtly involving reworking of crime novel mechanisms as the detective moves across a variety of class divides, finding that the police have got things wrong. Strike himself is a distinctive addition to the overcrowded ranks of literary private eyes. Strike’s second appearance in The Silkworm was not as impressive, but Career of Evil – while notably implausible with its multiple maniacs – recaptured the energy of the first book. Written in an unadorned, non-literary prose perfectly suited to the author’s purposes, Career of Evil confirms that Rowling’s post-Potter initiative is proving to be a very welcome one. Both Strike and Robin Ellacott (Strike’s female assistant, stuck in a dying relationship) are multidimensional, conflicted characters, and there is no gainsaying the sheer relish with which the writer tackles the genre. There are many unusual elements, such as Strike’s cross-country odyssey and the active sexual history of his rock groupie mother – rock music is significant: the title of the book is from a Patti Smith lyric.
CLAIRE McGOWAN became a familiar figure on the London crime fiction scene as a recent director of the Crime Writers’ Association, but it was clear from her assured debut novel that her real métier is delivering criminous diversions such as may be found in The Fall. There are elements of the police procedural here, with a well-drawn copper in DC Matthew Hegarty – though it has to be said that his is a familiar figure. The real achievement of the book, however, is its strikingly variegated cast of protagonists, particularly some vividly realised female figures whose individual characters fairly leap off the page. No doubt McGowan felt that we needed a conventional copper to draw her narrative together, but it’s the women here who count – such as the feckless mixed-race Keisha, in thrall to a pretty worthless male; she is someone we find ourselves wanting to spend time with, however annoyingly she behaves. (The males in the book are a pretty sorry bunch.) McGowan has a keen ear for class and social nuance, and readers of The Fall found themselves looking forward to her subsequent books with some anticipation; the recent A Savage Hunger is particularly satisfying.
When Clark Kent wants to shuck off his reporter persona, he takes off his glasses and opens his shirt to reveal a big red ‘S’. But what is a mild-mannered literary writer to do when he feels the urge to pen gritty crime fiction, with such titles as Putting the Boot In? In the case of Julian Barnes (known for his subtle and nuanced ‘serious’ novels), he invents the alter ego ‘DAN KAVANAGH’, giving him access to the kind of writing in which bloody murder is done. It’s a strategy that has been employed in the past by Poet Laureate C Day-Lewis (who cracked skulls as Nicholas Blake) and more recently by John Banville as ‘Benjamin Black’.
However, Barnes/Kavanagh’s sardonic sleuth Duffy has been around for several decades. He first appeared in an eponymous novel in 1980; as well as functioning as both a parody and a celebration of the detective genre, it introduced a sexually ambivalent ex-copper in an era when bisexuality in the crime genre was hardly quotidian. Its pithy sense of British locale and zeitgeist was an instant hit with aficionados, whatever their sexuality. Sadly, there were to be only four Duffy books, with Putting the Boot In the third outing for the character (Duffy’s polymorphous libido is not central here). It presents a cold-eyed image of ‘the beautiful game’ in which massively overpaid (and none too bright) sportsmen demonstrate distinctly thuggish tendencies – but this is football in the 1980s rather than the present, and the endemic corruption here is a reminder that in soccer plus ça change. Duffy is hired when the star player of a Third Division club is the victim of an apparent mugging in which his Achilles tendon is damaged, and the club’s manager foresees a host of impending attacks. The ingredients here? Racism, über-nationalist politics and empty celebrity, all handled with the customary Kavanagh acerbic touch. This may be the best Duffy novel – what perhaps dates it is its central concern with AIDS, but much of its interest lies in its 1980s accoutrements.
One might wonder, though, why Kavanagh’s publishers Orion downplayed the crime ethos when they reissued the book in 2014 – the design on the jacket showing table football figures conveys only one aspect of the narrative. Julian Barnes’ name, too, is not to be found anywhere on the inner sleeve, though erstwhile friend Martin Amis provides an encomium. There is, however, a blurred photo of ‘Dan Kavanagh’ with a text detailing the author’s adolescence of truancy, venery and petty theft along with his time as a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. Kavanagh, it seems, ‘now lives in North Islington’, clearly having written finis to his unlikely rip-roaring past.
The strapline for TIM WEAVER’s Chasing the Dead is ‘Death is not the end. But he’ll make you wish it was.’ And, for once, a publisher has summed up the essence of a taut thriller. Alex, the son of Mary Towne, disappeared some six years ago. He did reappear – but in gruesome fashion, as a body found in a car wreck. Mary sees a figure she believes is her son on the street some months later and tries to persuade missing persons investigator David Raker to help her. Raker is to find that Alex’s life was a complex one – and one that was very different from what his mother believed it to be. This is strong writing that thoroughly involves the reader: the start of an impressive series, as was evidenced by the later What Remains. And if you’re one of those readers unhappy with the new elephantiasis in crime fiction, when so many novels are obliged (as is What Remains) to be over 500 pages long, you might just have your mind changed by Weaver’s impressive narrative. The author manages to justify the book’s arm-straining length – not least with the layers of psychological penetration that he freights into his ambitious novel. Troubled detective Colm Healy is a man bereft; he has lost everything he enjoyed in his tenure as one of the Met’s most efficient policemen. His failure to track down a merciless, motiveless killer has led to the destruction of both his career and his marriage. But Healy has one friend left: missing persons investigator David Raker (whom we have met in earlier Weaver novels). What follows is a lacerating joint investigation, taking the characters (and readers) into the furthest reaches of obsession – and a quest for redemption. It’s a dark, complex and visceral read.
The pseudonymous TOM CAIN (actually David Thomas, no shrinking violet when it comes to assessing his own skills) has been refining his craft in the field of the blockbuster thriller for some time now, and he knows exactly how to make the reader’s pulse increase its customary rate. In Revenger, the world is in meltdown, with Iran’s nuclear facilities a radioactive rubble, the Euro having fallen apart and the wrecked economies of the world suffering daily unrest. Cain’s protagonist Sam Carver is just seeking a quiet drink with an old friend, but quietness is something not to be found in London anymore, and Sam is caught up in a riot. Things get very violent, and, to his dismay, Sam finds himself blamed for the mayhem, with the police and an old enemy on his trail. This is characteristically visceral stuff from Cain. As David Thomas, the writer made a mark with Blood Relative. A bloodbath awaits Peter Crookham when he arrives home. His brother, Andy, a journalist, is lying dead, the victim of multiple stab wounds, and Peter’s wife Mariana is covered in blood. Peter is convinced that his wife is innocent, but he discovers that the object of his brother’s final investigation was, in fact, Mariana’s complex past. Looming large in her life is a single man – a mysterious figure who had an affiliation with the East German security service, the Stasi. As well as being a compelling thriller, this is a novel about identity, delivered with professionalism.
In Then We Die, JAMES CRAIG’s Inspector John Carlyle is dismayed when he hears that his mother is getting a divorce after 50 years of marriage. But his professional life is also to be more testing than usual, when he comes across the execution of a rich businessman in an upscale London hotel. The murder victim appears to be the latest in a line of individuals targeted by a relentless Israeli hit squad, but Carlyle decides that tackling this murderous crew will at least distract him from the deeply destabilising events at home. As always with James Craig, the ever-accelerating pace here is handled with the authority of a master. While James Craig’s sequence of Inspector Carlyle novels (numbering such gritty and impressive entries as Never Apologise Never Explain, Buckingham Palace Blues and London Calling) has long been marked by its cool authority, Then We Die is one of the best.
The notable success of the TV adaptation of The Long Firm, starring Mark Strong (some time before his current level of film celebrity), consolidated the reputation of the uncompromising JAKE ARNOTT, whose trilogy of books set in London established a new high watermark for caustic, powerfully drawn crime fiction. But what makes Arnott’s sequence different from most of the competition is the realisation of the antihero, Harry Starks, an East End gangster who also happens to be gay. Starks debuted in Arnott’s first novel, The Long Firm, which also boasts a vividly delineated 1960s setting and mixes in elements of the Kray twins, whose violent reign included flirtations with both politicians and visiting celebrities. The first book’s successor, He Kills Coppers (also adapted for TV), moved the sequence from the 1960s to the Thatcher era, echoing the social criticism of rapacious acquisitiveness also to be found in John Mackenzie’s film The Long Good Friday. The third part of the Arnott sequence is Truecrime, which is set in the 1980s and 1990s.
Tyro novelist ADAM HAMDY spent eight years working in the glitzy Neverland of the movie business (following a career as a management consultant) before plucking up the courage to write a novel. As a screenwriter, he continues to work with producers and studios on both sides of the Atlantic, developing original material and adapting novels such as David Mitchell’s Number9Dream. Hamdy’s novel Out of Reach, set in London, has been described as a short sharp shock with a twist ending that leaves readers reeling. The book charts the story of Thomas Schaefer, an unconventional private investigator, who is drawn into a dark, warped world while searching for his lost daughter. Hamdy’s next novel, The Pendulum Effect, has a New York setting and tells the tale of John Wallace, a Londoner who is framed for his own attempted suicide. Hamdy has a passion for research that borders on the obsessive: not satisfied with simply taking up shooting to provide authentic descriptions of gunfire, he has earned a marksmanship certificate and has even undertaken basic gunsmith training. Hamdy has a degree in law and a second in philosophy; as he says, as a philosopher he can explain why something is morally wrong; as a lawyer he can advise how to get away with it.
In The Gilded Edge, Detective Vince Treadwell is investigating the case of two apparently unrelated murders: a young black woman from an unprivileged background and the well-heeled Belgravia resident Johnny Beresford. As Treadwell’s investigations take him from the illegal drinking holes of Notting Hill to the upscale gambling haunts of Berkeley Square, the reader is given a rich and atmospheric picture of every aspect of London, from the highest to the lowest. DANNY MILLER showed in the earlier Kiss Me Quick that his is a characterful voice, and his abilities are once again demonstrated at full stretch in this novel.
Modern black British crime writing has an unarguable signature book: Yardie by VICTOR HEADLEY. This gritty gangster saga, accused by some of being crassly written, focuses on a youthful Jamaican immigrant’s battle on the streets of London to lead the drug-dealing underworld. Headley’s book, the first in a series, stirred up controversy, with some black readers criticising an appeal to the lowest common denominator and an exploitative presentation of criminal black stereotypes. A riff on Scarface, Headley’s persuasive vision of this milieu, with an examination of music and food in the immigrant community, enjoyed massive sales – particularly among young black readers who often admitted that this was the first book they’d read. The unforgiving utilisation of Jamaican patois was a problem for some readers, but was worth the effort.
In JANE CASEY’s The Kill, the streets of London are awash with fear, but a ruthless killer is not targeting ordinary citizens – the target is policemen. Reassigned as a matter of urgency to investigate a series of savage attacks on her fellow officers, Maeve Kerrigan and her boss Josh Derwent have a troubling double problem: find out (very quickly) what is the motive behind these acts of brutality – and stop them. Meanwhile, the killer strikes again. More impressively kinetic thriller writing from the talented Jane Casey, who is proving to be an able practitioner of the genre.
The formidable BEN AARONOVITCH has an eccentric writing style – and literary preoccupations – that is very different from that of most of his colleagues. His speciality in his ‘Rivers of London’ sequence is a marked infusion of fantasy elements, and the London that his copper Peter Grant negotiates is a phantasmagorical location, appropriate for a protagonist whose other profession is that of wizard. Aaronovitch uses cleverly placed London-centric elements in such books as Whispers Under Ground, which makes the London Underground a strange and menacing place.
MAGGIE HAMAND’s debut novel in 1995, The Resurrection of the Body, was an assured piece of work, with ambitions beyond the customary remit of the crime novel. In the past, it was possible to believe in miracles and to lead a life of faith, but for Richard Page, vicar of a poor East End community in a more confused, cynical time, faith is not quite so straightforward, and the experience he endures during the celebration of Easter proves how fragile his devotion really is. The Good Friday service is shockingly interrupted when a man staggers in, bleeding from wounds inflicted during a vicious knife attack. There is no identification on him, and when he dies no one comes forward to claim the body. Then, on Easter Sunday, even more bizarrely, the corpse disappears from the morgue, leaving the police baffled but suspicious. The events that follow are even more disturbing, and draw the vicar into a bruising quest to uncover the man’s identity and explain the unexplainable. His obsession will bring him into conflict with the police, with his superiors, his congregation and even his wife. As reality slips beyond his control, Page’s faith is battered almost beyond endurance. The Resurrection of the Body provocatively addresses notions of love, religion and madness within the context of the mystery novel. The Rocket Man, which appeared in the same year (1995), was a change of pace for Hamand, but equally striking. More recently, she has published Doctor Gavrilov; this was hailed by Julian Rathbone as ‘like the very best le Carré’, and is a thriller concerning attempts by a Middle Eastern country to procure nuclear knowhow in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One of the quirkiest and most individual literary talents in the UK, KIM NEWMAN could hardly be described as conforming to any tenets of the crime genre (or, for that matter, any other genre) in his body of work, but his often surrealistic multiverse synthesises a dizzying variety of elements from many aspects of the crime field. There is a particular stress on lovingly rendered vintage elements, referenced in a massively ingenious series of genre pastiches. However, the term ‘pastiche’ does not do justice to Newman’s achievement – implying (as it does to many readers) an element of parody. Newman’s encyclopaedic knowledge of everything concerning British fictional crime protagonists in their literary, cinematic and televisual incarnations always celebrates as opposed to guying his subjects (Newman is as celebrated a film and TV critic as he is a novelist). The list of subjects in Newman’s oeuvre is ambitious: The Night Mayor is a film noir/science fiction hybrid, set in a computer-generated world derived from 1940s thrillers; Anno Dracula – perhaps his most accomplished novel (though not relevant to this study) – evokes the Jack the Ripper murders; The Quorum boasts as heroine a female private detective (Sally Rhodes, who has featured in Newman’s short stories). And writing as Jack Yeovil, Newman produced Beasts in Velvet, which riffs on notions of Dirty Harry versus a serial killer in a fantasy setting. Some of his other Yeovil stories also have crime/detective elements, notably ‘No Gold in the Grey Mountains’.
MIKE PHILLIPS, aka ‘Joe Canzius’, is a one-off. Black writers have tackled the urban crime scene before – and often with conspicuous success. But this Guyana-born practitioner of the thriller, while au fait with most aspects of black culture in both the US and the UK, is quintessentially British, and the author’s own clear-eyed vision is refracted through this heady mix to create a remarkable series of books. Phillips’ principal character, the crime-involved journalist Sam Dean, is a conduit for the reader to venture into a world rich and strange for many a white crime aficionado. And Phillips’ invigorating, often brutal prose never attitudinises – we are allowed to make up our own minds about the characters (black or white, honourable or callous) we encounter. There is a sharp social intelligence and analysis at work in Mike Phillips’ novels, but never at the expense of a cracking crime plot. As a journalist, he stored up the savvy that would be so crucial to his tough-but-honest journo hero, and with the first Sam Dean novel, Blood Rights in 1989, it was immediately clear that a striking new voice had arrived on the British crime-writing scene. A less-than-successful BBC TV adaptation of the novel did not lessen the steadily growing impact that successive Sam Dean novels, such as Point of Darkness, began to make.
As Joe Canzius, Phillips writes even tougher urban thrillers; these include Fast Road to Nowhere, in which the reader is forced to root for an amoral petty thief hero in a dangerous city landscape. It has often been pointed out that Phillips’ writing has more in common with American urban crime writers than with most British middle-class authors – despite the fact that his main protagonist, Dean, is very English. In terms of plotting, Phillips has no interest whatsoever in the Christie-style classic mystery plot in which various elements of puzzle are slotted into place; his is a messy, chaotic universe, with the author only just managing to pull everything together, creating a rough kind of closure. Phillips is aware of the perception that his Joe Canzius books are more squarely aimed at a black readership, but (he has said) this is not really the case. His first published work – a collection of short stories – was aimed at a black readership, but after that he decided that he wanted to write for whoever chose to pick up his books. Certainly, Sam Dean is a relatively easy character for white readers to identify with – while he is scathing about racism, he is often in as much danger from black villains as from prejudiced whites. And, of course, he is the ideologically firm centre of the books – tough, but very moral.
Without attempting any radical surgery on the police procedural format, PAUL CHARLES has demonstrated a proficiency in the genre that has proved to be very durable. Such books as The Justice Factory (featuring Charles’s resilient protagonist DI Christy Kennedy) have all the requisite ingredients, including a striking opening: a living body staring from the pit of a rain-drenched grave. Utilising pithily described locales – Camden and Primrose Hill – Charles places his various plot points with authority, allowing Kennedy to work uneasily alongside WDC Anne Coles as murder continues to be the fulcrum through which the characters are delineated.
The refreshingly unsparing style (in her life and her writing) of the writer RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS has meant that she is noted as much for her uncompromising analysis of political and societal issues as she is for her wickedly sardonic crime writing in which a variety of self-important establishment figures and shibboleths are ruthlessly punctured. Killing the Emperors is a typically lacerating Edwards piece in which the mechanics of the crime novel are balanced with a cutting satirical edge – it is a take on the crazy, corrupt world of conceptual art. Edwards has frequently demonstrated that, for her, nothing is sacred, and it is this quality that makes her books so mischievously diverting.
One of the best-known and affectionately regarded figures on the British crime scene is the witty writer SIMON BRETT, who, as well as being a toastmaster par excellence, is the creator of the wonderfully diverting, lightly comic Charles Paris novels, successfully adapted for radio. This is a medium in which Brett has enjoyed considerable success; the misconceived film of his non-Paris novel A Shock to the System, however, has drawn some of his most hilariously cutting comments. His inclusion in a study such as this – with the word ‘noir’ in the title – shows how loosely that appellation is being applied; ‘noir’ is something these books certainly aren’t. But, ah, the civilised entertainments of Simon Brett! It’s a breath of fresh air to pick up one of his witty and sardonic essays – perhaps the books sit neatly in the cosy genre, but this is the finest writing in the field. An example is The Shooting in the Shop, with a plot involving a store that is mysteriously burnt down, thus involving heroine Carole Seddon. Several suspicious characters are in the frame – including a comedy writer who isn’t very funny. Unlike Brett. To say that Brett has been turning out books like this for years sounds like faint praise; in fact, readers are in awe of his consistency.
The leading female black British crime writer is unarguably DREDA SAY MITCHELL, although she refreshingly resists ethnic identifications in her writing. Born in London to Grenadian parents and growing up on an estate in the East End, Mitchell is a ubiquitous broadcaster and also specialises in literacy programmes for underachieving black boys. Her first novel, the gritty Running Hot, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s award for best first novel in 2005, an achievement that was consolidated by her later Killer Tune. Her success is due to the fact that she writes about the streets where she grew up in sharp and idiomatic prose, and her recent Death Trap is a typically powerful novel.
With her distinctive retro mode of dress, CATHI UNSWORTH is – as she would probably be the first to admit – a woman born out of her time, pleasurably in thrall to an earlier era in terms of the music, fashion and rebellious attitudes. She first made her mark as a writer on popular music, but one of her principal skills is her evocation of her beloved London, which has a thoroughly individual and idiosyncratic timbre. Her books customarily receive excellent reviews, but particular approbation was enjoyed by Bad Penny Blues, which begins with the savage killing of a prostitute. Weirdo, however, is the book that has enjoyed perhaps the greatest acclaim. A young girl is convicted of killing one of her classmates one summer in 1984. Two decades later, new forensic evidence suggests that Corinne didn’t act alone… More recent work, such as the quirky, atmospheric Without the Moon, demonstrates that Unsworth has her formidable gifts still firmly in place.
Pungent, edgy, visceral (and told from beginning to end in an unchanging present tense), ADAM CREED’s Suffer the Children is as good a snapshot of the state of the modern British (urban) crime novel as you’re likely to encounter. In a London where everyone feels at risk from street crime, and knife-wielding drug dealers jostle with predatory child molesters for tabloid headlines, DI Will ‘Staffe’ Wagstaffe has all the necessary accoutrements for his thankless job: brusque manner, damaged love life, aggro from both his boss and the press. When a convicted paedophile is killed in his own home, Staffe is obliged to put the families of abused children under intense scrutiny; whatever Staffe and his colleagues think of the murder victim and his ilk, they are obliged to protect other known offenders. As the beleaguered Staffe struggles with press hostility and the less-than-benign influence of his ex-partner Jessop, he is forced to confront a very uncomfortable issue: how far should parents go to protect their children? This moral dilemma – the police’s duty to protect those they despise – is a theme treated even-handedly by Creed; the reader is allowed to balance their responses to the incendiary issues at the heart of the narrative. This makes for a distinctly trenchant read, although the present-tense device won’t please everyone.
Creed’s writing gods, self-evidently, are the tough Americans George Pelecanos and James Ellroy. The bleak vision of British society laid out for us here is minatory and unsettling; not perhaps the one we all live in, but certainly a world that anyone living in a major city intersects with at one time or another. Another presiding influence is The Wire’s David Simon; the banal, quotidian activities of low-level drug dealers are evoked with skill and economy, very much in the manner of the cult show. On the strength of Suffer the Children, it was clear that Creed had the smarts to make a mark in an overcrowded field.
Best known for his gritty, abrasive novels featuring the London private eye Nick Sharman, MARK TIMLIN (no stranger to unvarnished abrasiveness himself) imported the ethos of the American hard-boiled novel into a vividly realised south London setting, with crackling dialogue a speciality. Sharman was filmed for television with Clive Owen, but fell foul of one of the recurrent bouts of hysteria concerning screen violence and was not renewed. The books (including All the Empty Places) have recently been reissued.
Long a valued stalwart of the magazine and website Crime Time, RUSSELL JAMES – a man who doesn’t pull his punches – is a crime writer (and a historian of the genre) who absolutely refuses to be categorised. He is as adept at a kind of unsparing British hard-boiled writing as he is at black comedy – and entries in that genre rarely come blacker than The Newly Discovered Diaries of Doctor Kristal. James has set his quirky and beguiling comedy in the Swinging Sixties, and the format consists of the diaries of a doctor, a virginal 35-year-old with a predilection for homicide (the wordy subtitle is ‘whose strange obsessions cause him to murder some annoying patients’). The eponymous Dr Kristal is a really unusual creation in a genre that has had its fair share of eccentric murderers, and one of the particular pleasures of the book is seeing how the old Adam – sexual desire – can upset the best laid plans of even those who regard themselves as safely above such things. Dubbed ‘the Godfather of British Noir’ by Ian Rankin, James is also seen at his best in the much-praised Painting in the Dark, a novel split between two timelines. In the late twentieth century, a compelling new political leader, Tony Blair, sweeps to power. An art crime from the contemporary era is contrasted with the 1930s, when upper-class British toffs found themselves mesmerised by the new politics of Nazi Germany, and when the book’s heroines, Sidonie and Naomi Keene, were house guests of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. In 1997 London, that hidden past comes crashing back, bringing darkness in its wake.
The energetic HELEN SMITH is the author of several acclaimed novels, including the dystopian The Miracle Inspector, but her signature series may be the lively ‘Emily Castles Mysteries’. She is also the author of children’s books, poetry and plays. In 2015, she set up BritCrime, a free online crime fiction festival involving more than 40 British crime writers, which has proved to be a clever initiative.
Socially committed writing was on offer when COURTTIA NEWLAND published his first novel, The Scholar, at the age of 23, immediately making a mark as one of the few British writers who accurately – and non-exploitatively – portray teenage life in London’s inner cities. The Scholar enjoyed bestseller status, and the writer’s second novel, Society Within, located on the same fictional Greenside Estate in West London, enjoyed good reviews. Newland’s third book, Snakeskin, inhabited the same locales, but was more avowedly a detective novel, dealing with an investigation into the murder of a Labour MP’s daughter.
Experienced crime fiction journalists (which is what this writer is supposed to be) theoretically possess a radar that spots highly successful books before the general public picks up on them. Well, I can modestly mention that this was the case with the early work of Thomas Harris, but I certainly didn’t predict that The Girl on the Train by PAULA HAWKINS was to become such a phenomenal, record-breaking success. It struck me on first reading as a perfectly efficient Hitchcockian thriller, but I wouldn’t have bet on it accruing the kind of success it has. Hawkins, however, clearly has her finger on the pulse of what the reading public likes. The relatively unsympathetic Rachel is an alcoholic who suffers from losses of memory, and is smarting from the pain of her husband abandoning her for a younger woman. When she notices some suspicious happenings from a train window, the police pay no attention. Needless to say – they should. The basic premise may owe something to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (or Cornell Woolrich’s original novella – not to mention Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington), but Hawkins handles it with aplomb.
Where the Devil Can’t Go marked ANYA LIPSKA out as a crime writer of bravura skills, and her pungent novel Death Can’t Take a Joke continued her upward trajectory. Presenting an edgy, visceral vision of modern London at the mercy of ambitious Eastern European criminals, Death Can’t Take a Joke boasts complex protagonists, sharply realised locales and a keen social awareness. Lipska is at the forefront of a new wave of culture-clash crime writers.
SHEILA BUGLER’s crime series featuring DI Ellen Kelly is located in Greenwich and Lewisham, south-east London. Until recently, Bugler lived in this area and it’s the part of London she knew and loved best; the author has been successful in making this little pocket of the capital seem real and tangible, with landmarks such as a characterful local pub called the Dacre Arms featuring in all the novels. New readers should perhaps start with her first novel, Hunting Shadows.
ANDREW CARTMEL’s Written in Dead Wax is the first in a series featuring a nameless, sardonic narrator and protagonist – somewhat in the manner of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op or Len Deighton’s anonymous secret agent. Somewhat more soft- than hard-boiled, the character begins as a crate-digging record collector who haunts charity shops and boot fairs looking for rare records, either to add to his own extensive collection or to sell so he can earn a marginal living. His business card describes him as the ‘Vinyl Detective’ and some people take this description more literally than others. Such as the enigmatic, seductive woman who offers him a huge sum of money to find a priceless lost jazz record on behalf of an obscenely wealthy, rather sinister Japanese client. The narrative voice and the menacing world of double-dealing and hired killers channels classic noir, but there are also contradictory elements of the cosy and puzzle crime fiction. Set largely in a vividly depicted London, the book also ranges abroad, to Los Angeles and Omura in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan.
Other writers and key books
PETER ACKROYD: Hawksmoor
DS BUTLER: Deadly Obsession, Deadly Justice
WILL CARVER: Girl 4, The Two
KIMBERLEY CHAMBERS: The Betrayer, The Victim
LIZA CODY: Head Case, Backhand
TAMMY COHEN: Dying for Christmas, First One Missing
JJ CONNOLLY: Layer Cake, Viva La Madness
MAT COWARD: Over and Under, Open and Closed
DENISE DANKS: Phreak, Better Off Dead
STEPHEN DAVISON: Dead Innocent, Kill & Cure
LUKE DELANEY: The Toy Taker, Cold Killing
MICHAEL DONOVAN: Behind Closed Doors
LOUISE DOUGHTY: Apple Tree Yard
PENNY HANCOCK: Tideline, The Darkening Hour
LAUREN HENDERSON: Pretty Boy
GRAHAM ISON: A Damned Serious Business, All Quiet on Arrival
JESSIE KEANE: Dirty Game
ROBERTA KRAY: Nothing but Trouble
AVA MARSH: Untouchable
ALEX MARWOOD: The Killer Next Door
GF NEWMAN: Sir, You Bastard, You Flash Bastard
KATE RHODES: A Killing of Angels, Crossbones Yard
JACQUI ROSE: Trapped, Taken
SIMON SPURRIER: A Serpent Uncoiled, Contract
JERRY SYKES: Lose This Skin
PETER TURNBULL: Deep Cover
SUSAN WILKINS: The Mourner
The South and South East
All popular entertainment fields end up chasing their tails, so why should crime fiction be any different? Most of the time, it isn’t. A book or an author makes a mark with a new idea, and publishers scramble over themselves to get their authors writing similar books, staying just the right side of plagiarism. There are, however, some talented writers who are either so quirkily idiosyncratic – or just plain bloody-minded – that their books resolutely resist conforming to whatever the latest modishness is. Foremost among this admirable company is the award-winning BELINDA BAUER, who – in the space of half a dozen books – has become one of the most individual of crime writers. Her first novel was the very distinctive Blacklands, shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and, a year later, winning the CWA Gold Dagger. Her most recent book was Rubbernecker, which had her admirers claiming that this was her best work, and so expectations were high for The Shut Eye when it appeared in 2015.
Anna Buck’s son Daniel has gone missing, leaving behind only five footprints in cement as a sign that he ever existed. But this memento becomes immensely important to his devastated mother, who polishes the footprints daily as if they were religious relics. The suicidal Anna is a woman clearly hovering near the fringes of insanity, and it is hardly surprising when she turns to a TV psychic, Latham, for clues as to what happened to her son. Readers are inevitably sceptical of this man, but one beacon of hope may be on offer for Anna, if she can but take advantage of it: DCI John Marvel, who, despite a cold, withholding personality, is clearly a man who will leave no stone unturned in a search for the truth.
The Shut Eye (the expression means a genuine psychic) is very satisfying, even though in terms of inventiveness it is a notch below the impeccable form of Blacklands and Rubbernecker. But, having said that, even lesser work from Bauer is streets ahead of most of her rivals. Her secrets are easy to discern: mastery of characterisation that makes most writing in the genre seem undernourished – both the tragic Anna and the curmudgeonly copper Marvel are fully fleshed-out three-dimensional figures, the contrast between her gullibility and his cynicism piquant and sharp. And, as so often with Bauer’s work, along with the quirkiness mentioned above, a growing sense of malign horror lurks at the edge of the narrative that ensures an intensity of reading experience. By the time of the climax, in which the footprints in the cement acquire a bizarre new significance, readers will find themselves rushing to the final pages.
A relatively recent trend in crime writing has been the appearance of socially committed novels set in cloistered immigrant communities in the UK. Anya Lipska tackles it with Poles in London, and EVA DOLAN’s ambitious Long Way Home focuses on Peterborough’s immigrant workers, menaced by ruthless gangmasters. With two quirky coppers from non-English backgrounds and a vivid panoply of a Peterborough that is some distance from customary perceptions of the historic cathedral town, this is crime fiction of authority, making some cogent points amidst the pulse-racing stuff.
In No Mark Upon Her by the reliable DEBORAH CROMBIE, DCI Rebecca Meredith is also an Olympic rowing hopeful, but when she sets out to train on the river in Henley in late October, she disappears. The search by the police suggests that she may have been the victim of murder. Scotland Yard commissions Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid to investigate, and he soon discovers that the missing woman’s ex-husband had a reason for wanting her dead – and he was not alone. A complex and dangerous investigation ensues. Deborah Crombie has a highly impressive list of crime novels to her name, and No Mark Upon Her may comfortably be regarded as a signature book.
She may be best known for her adroit historical crime fiction, but Dying to Know, by ex-Crime Writers’ Association Chair ALISON JOSEPH, is a vauntingly ambitious crime novel about particle physics: contemporary fare that balances ideas and storytelling nous. Dying to Know is set around a (fictional) particle collider in Kent. An apparent serial killer is targeting physicists working there, and DI Berenice Killick, herself an outsider, has to investigate. A smart and thoughtful novel that circles ideas of faith and science, Dying to Know asks a lot of the reader but still delivers a page-turning story. Joseph has contributed to the essays in Detective: Crime Uncovered, a collection put together by this writer that covers both British and international crime writing.
The time may come when we grow tired of feisty female pathologists in books and on TV, but that time is not yet; this sub-genre remains as popular as ever, with new additions appearing at a rate of knots. And there will undoubtedly be a ready audience for the fifth in NIGEL McCRERY’s Silent Witness murder mystery series, in which pathologist Professor Sam Ryan (as incarnated on TV by Amanda Burton) roots among the dead flesh for clues to crack an imponderable mystery – dealing (as usual) with sceptical colleagues and contradictory evidence. While many readers would assume that Patricia Cornwell gave birth to this particular genre, she was, in fact, only the midwife, and Ed McBain was the first to bring the world of pathology into the mainstream with his 87th Precinct thrillers. And Nigel McCrery’s prose suggests that he might have gone further back for inspiration than Ms Cornwell – to the source, in fact. In the efficient Tooth and Claw, DCI Mark Lapslie is the victim of a rare and troubling neurological condition that cross-wires his senses. This debilitating condition has effectively ruined his marriage and put his career into a backwater. His colleagues now routinely regard him as a drunk or, worse, unbalanced. Isolating himself in an Essex coast cottage, Mark tries to attain some kind of equilibrium. At the same time, 22-year-old Carl Whittley is similarly confined to his house, caring for his crippled father. But there is a signal difference between the two men: Carl is a monster who has just tortured a minor TV celebrity to death and blown to pieces an anonymous commuter. Inevitably, these two damaged individuals are to meet in a lethal game which will have a terrifying – and very final – outcome.
COLIN DEXTER’s Oxford Detective Inspector Morse is one of the key protagonists in British detective fiction – a surly, complex and brilliant character who Dexter has guided through a series of elegantly written novels. Channelling Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (both the intellect and sharp temper), Inspector Morse is a figure who has triumphed on both page and screen. Morse’s creator Colin Dexter shares with his sleuth a certain erudition (with a strong affection for AE Housman – Dexter is fond of quoting the poet’s A Shropshire Lad). The highly successful TV series featuring persuasive performances by the late John Thaw as Morse made no easy bids for sympathy, and increased the popularity of the character, both cementing the sales of the books and expanding the number of Morse admirers across the globe (notably in the US). Intriguingly, the TV series actually had an impact on the books, with Dexter effecting changes in the characters. Dexter’s first detective novel, Last Bus to Woodstock (published in 1975), established the author as a master of the crime genre. In the book, we encounter an Inspector Morse – and his sidekick, DS Lewis – who are not the characters with whom we are now conversant. Several of the familiar notions are here (Morse’s penchant for crossword puzzles, classical music and real ale), but Lewis is, in fact, the older copper, becoming younger only in the later books. We have for the first time the wonderfully drawn milieu and landscape of Oxford, in both its academic and non-academic aspects. The book was followed by such excellent entries as Last Seen Wearing, The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, the distinctive Service of All the Dead in 1979 and The Dead of Jericho two years later, along with many others. Dexter wrote finis to the series with The Remorseful Day in 1999, which featured both Morse’s death and the revelation of his first name, Endeavour.
A few pages into HILARY BONNER’s No Reason to Die, it’s clear that the engine for her plot is the controversial deaths of several young soldiers at Deepcut barracks (here rendered as the isolated Hangridge army training base in the heart of Dartmoor). No doubt, a dozen other crime authors are kicking themselves that they didn’t see the literary possibilities in this story with quite the alacrity of the canny Bonner (once a journalist before turning to crime), but there’s an obvious danger here in trivialising a serious issue – one that’s still the source of bitter dispute between the parents of the soldiers and the army authorities – for what is essentially a diverting entertainment. However, Bonner is a responsible writer, and plays fair by the source of her inspiration.
Perhaps this might be down to her years as one of Fleet Street’s finest. Unhappy with the way things were going at the Mirror, she decided to work on some chapters that had been in her bottom drawer and turn them into a novel. And that book, The Cruelty of Morning, was her first success. She never looked back, and a series of unfussy, tautly paced thrillers have followed, while the indefatigable Bonner has tried her hand at several other pursuits, including being a very active chair of the Crime Writers’ Association. But Bonner’s métier lies in writing books such as No Reason to Die. Ex-reporter John Kelly has appeared before in her work; here, he’s at his lowest ebb, contemplating the uninspiring spectacle of his life and finding it hard to cope with the slow, painful death of a lover. While out drinking, Kelly takes under his wing a drunken young squaddie, until the latter is spirited away by two men – fellow soldiers (Kelly assumes) at the young man’s base. But then Kelly learns that he has died – and that his death is not an isolated one: several young soldiers (both men and women) have perished at the headquarters of the Devonshire Fusiliers, principally from gunshot wounds. If the final revelations don’t quite have the moral force that Bonner seems to have been preparing us for, the steady stripping down of layers of misdirection shows real storytelling skill – while this book isn’t likely to be on the bedside tables of many army personnel, it’s a gripping read for the rest of us. After something of a hiatus in her writing career, Bonner came storming back with such books as 2015’s Death Comes First.
Those who have followed the protean writing career of NJ COOPER over the years have learned to expect the unexpected – it’s certainly been an unpredictable journey for the Cooper aficionado. There is no denying that the author has transmogrified into a very different entity from the writer who used the name ‘Natasha’, but – whatever the name – in an assured and compelling series of novels, Cooper has established a reputation as one of the most reliable of current crime fiction practitioners. In Vengeance in Mind, the businessman and philanthropist Dan Blackwater is discovered murdered in his house on the Isle of Wight. He is lying on the kitchen table, his body mutilated and knives transfixing his wrists and ankles. Also in the house is his personal assistant, Sheena Greeves. What is her connection with the murder? She appears to have no memory of the event, but she remains DCI Charlie Trench’s prime suspect. However, Charlie is aware that things are not as they seem, and calls upon forensic psychologist Karen Taylor to help probe the distraught woman’s clouded memory. But what the duo brings to light is far more than they expected. Vengeance in Mind is one of Cooper’s most trenchant novels, bristling with her usual authoritative plotting but also taking on board the unvarnished picture of British society that has become her signature.
Cooper’s Trish Maguire series (written as Natasha Cooper) was much admired; Laura Lippman wrote of A Poisoned Mind: ‘A smart, complex, grown-up entertainment that rewards the reader on every page.’ That book is a fine example of this writer’s legal series about barrister Maguire, whose prime motivation is a hatred of injustice and all forms of cruelty. Here, Cooper offers a two-stranded narrative about toxic damage: one layer deals with an explosion in waste-chemical tanks on a farm in Northumberland; the other with the effects of childhood trauma and poor parenting.
While once comfortably established as a newspaper literary editor, HENRY SUTTON’s real vocation is as an unorthodox and provocative novelist, and My Criminal World is a persuasive example of his work. The book functions on a variety of levels: both as a mesmerising piece of crime fiction and as a subtle detonation of the genre. Sutton is interested in the way in which the tropes of the field work, and uses such things very much to his own ends. My Criminal World is proof of both his skill and the unending flexibility of the crime genre.
JUDITH CUTLER has chiselled away at the rock face of British crime writing for some considerable time, and while she might not have enjoyed the financial success of some of the more stellar names in the genre, she has quietly established a reputation for herself as a professional and reliable crime writer. The series of books featuring DS Kate Power (such us Staying Power, Power Games and Will Power) is so good that one can forgive Cutler the groan-inducing, punning titles that she (or her publisher) favours. Hidden Power is one of the most solid outings for Kate. Promotion is on the cards, and (for once) her personal life is on a roll: she’s happy with lover Rod Neville, and has even won a holiday in a prize draw. Inevitably, she can hardly relax and enjoy her vacation at the South Coast holiday complex, where some very strange things are happening. Investigating what begins to look like a sinister conspiracy by working undercover as a cleaner at another venue in the same chain, she is soon in danger, barely aided by her partner Craig, an unpleasant misogynist. All the usual Cutler fingerprints are here: smooth, involving plotting and characterisation that sustains its effects through nicely drawn conflicts (this time a clash with her unlikeable colleague, who is more dangerous than the villains).
In The Doll’s House, by hotshot MJ ARLIDGE, a young woman wakes in a cold dark cellar, totally disoriented – she has no idea how she arrived there or who kidnapped her. And nearby, the body of another young woman is found buried on a remote beach, but she was not considered to be missing – her family have been getting regular texts from her for years. DI Helen Grace is soon on the track of a particularly unpleasant monster. With a manipulation of tension that is always fluid and cinematic, MJ Arlidge’s novel grabs the reader by the throat – as does his single-minded, unconventional policewoman Helen Grace, with her unorthodox S&M sexual tastes. More recently, the taut Liar Liar continued Arlidge’s upwards trajectory.
Nobody – least of all the cast and crew – take the self-parodying TV series Midsomer Murders seriously, not least because of its ludicrous methods of dispatching the various victims. But for anyone familiar with the original novels of CAROLINE GRAHAM (and dismissive of the TV adaptations), one word will spring to mind again and again: plotting. This is what Graham does – impeccably. In such books as Death in Disguise and A Place of Safety, Graham has conjoined persuasive characterisation with narrative assurance of an impressive order. In A Ghost in the Machine, we’re given a comfortable, in-each-other’s-pockets community that is party to a dark secret. Kate and Mallory Lawson take possession of a relative’s well-appointed house in the village of Forbes Abbot, and pleasurably anticipate the destressing that the move from metropolitan life will hopefully bring. But they’re in for a disappointment: the village’s internecine feuds seem to have a lethal edge. When violent death ensues, the doughty DCI Barnaby finds himself with a very tangled web – quite as baffling as the Midsomer Murders that usually keep him occupied.
In a series of elegantly written crime novels set in the past (including The Savage Garden and The Information Officer), MARK MILLS has demonstrated that he is a novelist of real psychological acuity, as interested in the bruising interaction of his characters as in the mechanics of the crime plot; the best writers in the genre have, of course, long practised such tactics. But there is one area that Mills has made very much his own: the untrustworthiness of appearances, and the pitfalls for those who make no attempts to look beneath seductive, attractive surfaces.
It is this notion that informs The Long Shadow, Mills’ first book set in the modern period. And if the book does not initially exert the grip of his earlier work, this is actually part of the slow-burning strategy that – by the final chapter – renders this the most richly textured book Mills has yet written. His protagonist, Ben, has entered his forties with a faltering screenwriting career. What’s more, his wife has fallen in love with a well-heeled business type, and Ben finds himself in an insalubrious flat, his life clearly in a downward spiral (another source of worry being his fractious interaction with his teenage son). But his luck suddenly appears to change: a wealthy investor is prepared to back his latest screenplay. However, all is not what it seems. Ben’s generous backer is someone he knew at school, Victor Sheldon, now a hedge fund millionaire. Ben drives out to Sheldon’s Oxfordshire estate to rewrite his screenplay. While there, he immerses himself in a sybaritic lifestyle, agreeing to be a business go-between and even undertaking an affair with another recipient of Sheldon’s largesse, a young sculptress. But things are to turn very nasty.
The Long Shadow of the title is a Proustian one – the shadow cast by the events of childhood. The rivalry between the two schoolmates initially seems to be a thing of the past, but Ben is insufficiently rigorous in examining quite what the relationship really consisted of, and he pays a heavy price for his self-deceit. There is an echo of a literary model in the mix here: JG Farrell’s Troubles, in which a hapless central character is slow to identify just who his enemies are. Beneath its glittering carapace, this is a rather bitter narrative, but The Long Shadow’s meticulousness and intelligence pay dividends.
It seems a million years ago that PETER GUTTRIDGE was one of the sharpest and wittiest writers of comic crime that this country has produced. He’s still an excellent writer, but his territory has shifted – not that his new sequence of Brighton-set crime novels dispenses with humour, but the tone is decidedly darker, and the world presented to the reader a much more dangerous one than any of the author’s lighter novels featuring beleaguered detective Nick Madrid. This new series began as a trilogy but has now extended to five volumes – Guttridge is nothing if not unorthodox. As in the acclaimed first volume in the sequence, City of Dreadful Night, in The Last King of Brighton the benighted seaside town is every bit as menacing as that conjured by Graham Greene as a location for the murderous Pinkie to ply his trade. Criminal kingpin Dennis Hathaway maintains a successful criminal empire by a combination of ruthlessness and greasing of police palms. His son John has no idea how his father makes his money, and pursues the customary teenage enterprises of the 1960s: playing in a group and seeking sexually available girls. But as he reaches 17, John is made aware of the corruption on which his legacy is built. In the present day, John is now in charge of his father’s empire, and has learned just how the world works. But then a man is found brutally murdered on the South Downs, having been tortured to death – and this act of monstrous violence is to have a seismic effect on John’s life. Guttridge combines pithy and evocative scene-setting with dialogue that has the ring of authenticity, and he successfully banished the recurrent problem of the second novel in a sequence (when a lowering of temperature is almost inevitable) – this book is every bit as visceral as its predecessor. It had readers impatient for succeeding volumes – including the fifth, 2014’s Those Who Feel Nothing.
The industrious PETER JAMES has always enjoyed success – in whatever genre he has tackled, from horror to the supernatural to crime (the latter his current fiefdom, though he hasn’t entirely cut his earlier genres adrift). Dead Like You is a typical example of his increasingly popular series featuring Brighton detective Roy Grace. This one sold even more spectacularly than its predecessors, keeping crime heavyweights James Patterson and John Grisham from the number one slot in the UK bestseller lists. And after lengthy delays, Grace has made his debut on stage – in Malvern, in fact, where Shaw premiered some of his plays. So what is the secret of the James/Grace success? It’s simple: over many years and many books, James has refined his storytelling skills and has the measure of the police procedural narrative. In Dead Like You, Brighton’s Metropole Hotel is the venue for a grim crime: a woman is brutally raped when she enters a room. Subsequently, another woman is similarly assaulted – both have their shoes taken by the rapist. Working on the case, Detective Superintendent Grace realises that these two incidents have disturbing echoes of a sequence of crimes that shocked Brighton in 1997. The rapist (who earned the nickname ‘The Shoe Man’) notched up five victims, the last of which he had murdered before vanishing. Grace is confronted with two unpleasant possibilities: that the original Shoe Man who evaded justice ten years ago has reappeared, or – equally disturbing – there is a copycat at work.
A clever ploy that has tantalised readers of James’s Grace books has been the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the detective’s wife, Sandy – a disappearance that James has allowed to remain unsolved. The writer’s best work, however, may be a standalone with an SF flavour, Perfect People.
Winner of a much-desired Crime Writers’ Association Dagger, Half Broken Things is one of the most impressive novels from MORAG JOSS, a writer who has balanced total narrative authority with keen psychological underpinnings in such books as Funeral Music and Fearful Symmetry. There are two central concepts in Half Broken Things: the impermanence of the crust of reality that conceals uncomfortable truths, and the ineluctable hold of the past over the present. Jean Wade earns her living housesitting, but in her sixties loses her job. However, coming across the keys to the locked cupboards and secrets of the final home she is housesitting, the upscale Walden Manor, she is able to assume ownership. What follows is a strange transformation: Jean begins to change things in the house, while forging a surrogate family. This family includes Michael and Steph, who have, like Jean, not made a success of their lives, and the bolthole the trio fashion is predicated upon an extrapolated – and illusory – past. But the happiness they enjoy proves to be fragile, when hidden things from years ago begin to impinge upon their day-to-day existence. And the results for their liaison are catastrophic. The degree of insight into the subterranean aspects of the human mind are laid bare as unerringly here as in any avowedly ‘literary’ novel, and such specialists in this kind of narrative (in the non-crime field) as William Trevor are pleasingly echoed.
LC TYLER, as well as doing duty as chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, is one of the UK’s most civilised and inventive writers in comic crime territory. The Herring in the Library, with its Christie-esque title, might be said to be a signature book; this is very much a traditional country house mystery with a limited number of suspects, all of whom were present at the time of the murder. It also has elements of the ‘locked room’ mystery, and Cluedo is another theme that runs through the book – Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet are mentioned in the opening and many of the rooms in the house have the same names as rooms on the Cluedo board. The assembled guests at Muntham Court become aware over dinner that there are tensions in the room. In the middle of the meal, Sir Robert stands and makes a short speech – each of the guests, he says, occupies a special place in his life and he intends that the evening will be a very special one for them. He then leaves the room. There is some speculation as to what he is planning, but, shortly afterwards, he is discovered in his locked library – strangled. A deliciously witty parody (as are all Len Tyler’s books) that still functions on its own terms.
Slowly but surely, LEIGH RUSSELL has been building a reputation as a solid practitioner of the modern crime genre, and Dead End is a worthy addition to her CV. The body of headmistress Abigail Kirby is found by the police; her tongue has been cut out as she lay dying. Russell’s copper, DI Geraldine Steel, realises she is up against an unpleasant nemesis when a witness is blinded and then killed. But Geraldine has other problems on her plate apart from the violence erupting around her: her daughter has left home to meet a girl she made friends with online – and this action may well have grim consequences. At the same time, DS Ian Peterson is drawing closer to the serial killer, and both police officers are in for an encounter that will take them into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Steel and Peterson are a strikingly realised duo in a field that is overcrowded with such teams, but Russell has the smarts to render her protagonists in such a way that we’re not reminded of her many rivals. At nearly 400 pages, this is one of the longest of the author’s books, but crime fiction admirers will find that those pages turn very swiftly.
SIMON SHAW fashioned a line in Shakespearean titles with such novels as Bloody Instructions and Dead for a Ducat. Synthesising the cold-eyed psychological intensity of Ruth Rendell with a laser-sharp observation of the social scene, Shaw’s speciality has been a series of carefully arranged danses macabres between his characters. In Killing Grace, he incorporates a destabilising element: the motivations of his three protagonists unfold in a continually disorientating fashion, constantly inviting the reader to think they have the necessary bearings, only to abandon the compass.
The charismatic Lewis is irresistible to women, and his work as a builder allows him to avail himself of the houses, beds and sexual charms of his clients’ wives. But his dalliances are beginning to lose their charm: he is broke, and he’s finding it harder to stick to his motto – don’t get involved. The seductive Julie has made him break his code, and his relationship with her lasts long after he finishes the job on her house. Peter McGovern is a very different kettle of fish: wealthy, but as unappealing as Lewis is attractive. But Julie is his wife, and when the two men meet by accident over a game of pool, all three lives will be changed irrevocably. Mixed into this dangerous brew is the deceptively angelic Grace, whose fragile good looks conceal a ruthless sensibility and an acerbic tongue. When she becomes involved with both men, the outcome for one or more of the characters is bound to be bloody. Shaw’s smoothly amoral tale is notable for its dispassionate telling: the author never nudges his readers but guides them inexorably through a narrative that becomes ever more sinister.
Lindy and her teenage daughter Izzy move to Stagcote Manor in the Cotswolds in what they hope will be a much-needed new start for them. They leave behind an unhappy life in London, but the alienated daughter is almost immediately unhappy, feeling trapped in a new existence that was supposed to be the answer to their problems. There is something about their new house that subtly disturbs her, and as she explores it (and the village in which it is located) she comes to believe that a host of local superstitions held by the villagers all relate to the manor. As she begins to investigate, it appears that these superstitions have a rational – and dangerous – basis. RS PATEMAN’s The Prophecy of Bees is psychological suspense delivered with great skill by an author much acclaimed for his debut, The Second Life of Amy Archer.
In a very short time, the writing reputation of ISABELLE GREY has achieved the kind of status that other writers take years to attain, and her considerable experience working in television has given her work a strong visual component. And her Colchester-set Good Girls Don’t Die provides a clear demonstration of her skills. Accused of grassing up a fellow officer and driven out of home and job, DS Grace Fisher is licking her wounds while working in the Major Crimes Investigation Team in Essex. A female student goes missing, last seen at a popular bar in Colchester. Then a second student is murdered and left in a grotesquely posed position…
FELIX FRANCIS novels bear the strapline ‘A Dick Francis Novel’ – as Hemingway didn’t quite say, ‘The Son Also Rises’. In Damage, Jeff Hinkley is a resourceful undercover investigator for the British Horseracing Authority. He is used to double-dealing and crooked behaviour in the equestrian fraternity, but, while looking into the unorthodox activities of a racehorse trainer at the Cheltenham Racing Festival, he finds himself investigating a brutal murder. Is the death related to the initial reason why the trainer was banned – the administering of illegal drugs to horses? As earlier Felix Francis outings such as Silks have demonstrated, the Dick Francis franchise is ticking over in the hands of his son and heir. Francis fils had been involved with his father’s novels in various capacities for over 40 years, and he is adept at forging a simulacrum of the familiar style. The original flavour is here, and Dick Francis fans probably won’t complain.
VERONICA STALLWOOD has made a speciality of the Oxford-set crime novel, often matching (and at times surpassing) that other purveyor of crime under the Dreaming Spires, Colin Dexter. Her prose has a brisk, no-nonsense efficiency, and her sense of locale is always sure-footed – she has lived in Oxford for many years, and knows well both the city and its university. Yet she views Oxford with the sharp eye of an outsider and brings it to life in an unsentimental way, far removed from the chocolate-box images usually shown on television. She flings open the oaken doors of venerable colleges and shows what’s really happening inside, based on her own experience of working at the Bodleian, Oxford’s library, as well as in various colleges. And her sleuth, Kate Ivory, a 30-something romantic novelist, is also less than perfect – ‘a flesh-and-brains heroine’, as one critic put it, who enjoys white wine, chocolate biscuits and the company of unsuitable men. An ever-expanding circle of friends and lovers, not to mention her mother and her literary agent, has joined Kate over the years, developing strong characters and stories of their own. Stallwood’s ‘Oxford’ novels, published from 1993 onwards, include Oxford Exit, Oxford Knot and Oxford Letters, with the fourteenth – and final – title being Oxford Ransom. These ingenious novels (all of which feature the resourceful Kate) have a devoted following. And Stallwood’s finely tuned standalone suspense novel The Rainbow Sign, based on her experience in the Lebanon, demonstrated that her adroit plotting matched that of any of her contemporaries.
Experienced TV writer SIMON BOOKER’s Morgan Vine in Without Trace is an ace investigative journalist. At least, that was the plan. But at 36 her career is in the doldrums and her love life’s a joke. She’s living in a converted railway carriage on the beach at Dungeness and still carrying a torch for her old flame, Danny Kilcannon. He’s in prison, convicted of murdering his stepdaughter. But Morgan knows he’s innocent, so she helps him to win his appeal and regain his freedom. But when her own daughter goes missing, Morgan is forced to confront the possibility that she might have been wrong – and that the love of her life might be a ruthless killer after all… Without Trace is set to be the first in the series of psychological thrillers featuring Vine, and Booker’s hard-won expertise is evident on every page.
His face is familiar from many television appearances, and his voice from lengthy radio duty. MARK LAWSON may be best known as a formidably well-read cultural commentator and interviewer, but a particular speciality is crime fiction, and his insights into the genre are nonpareil – for several years, he has been a key figure at the Harrogate crime writing festival. Although he had been a novelist in the past, 2013 marked his return to fiction with the distinctive The Depths. The book is set in Buckinghamshire and deals with a dramatis personae who enjoy a sheltered lifestyle while the rest of the UK suffers from cuts and austerity. An act of violence upsets this ordered pattern, and Lawson’s delineation of its grim consequences demonstrates the hand of a master.
WILLIAM SHAW’s A Song from Dead Lips was a novel that arrived with considerable fanfare from its publisher and an encomium from the celebrated historical crime writer CJ Sansom. It is, in fact, a period piece itself, set in the Swinging Sixties but concerned with exploring the darker undercurrents of the summer of peace and love – and thus not up for consideration in a study devoted to contemporary-set crime fiction. Shaw, however, produced (in 2016) a novel set in the present day that is quite as adroitly written as his earlier work. The Birdwatcher is a stygian and intelligent crime novel that takes in both the Troubles in Northern Ireland and a contemporary murder investigation, dealing with the Ulster Volunteer Force, migrants in Kent and modern-day policing. In Dungeness, Police Sergeant William South has a keen reason for not wanting to be on a murder investigation: he is himself a murderer (the victim was his only friend). A quiet, reticent birdwatcher, South finds himself paired with the strong-willed DS Alexandra Cupidi, newly recruited to the Kent coast from London. Together they find a body, violently beaten, inside a wooden chest. But – too precipitately – they light upon a suspect: Donnie Fraser, a drifter from Northern Ireland. His presence in Kent disturbs South because he knows him. As a boy, South and his mother fled their home in County Armagh, and, for many reasons, he has never looked back. If the past is catching up with him, South wants to meet it head-on. The Birdwatcher is a pungent, powerful tale that takes on the apprehension of a life lived in fear of retribution. Shaw’s Breen & Tozer series is splendid, but let’s hope he tackles the present again – albeit with the past looming in Damoclean fashion.
Is this a recipe for success? Take one long-established literary copper (such as RD Wingfield’s misanthropic DS Frost), in cold storage since the death of his creator, and hand him to two younger writers to reinvigorate the character… two writers, what’s more, who clearly haven’t got much sympathy for the miserable old bugger. Somebody at the publisher deserved a pat on the back for the notion, however, as – against all the odds – the success of First Frost (first fruit of the duo’s collaboration) was incontestable: this became a palpable hit, and proved that there was plenty of life in the terminally un-PC Jack Frost. Which may or may not have been good news for the writers James Gurbutt and Henry Sutton (then working together as ‘JAMES HENRY’), who were obliged to continue chronicling Frost’s investigations: their Frankenstein monster had them by the scruff of the neck. Actually, there are precedents for not liking one’s characters: the best film featuring Mickey Spillane’s thick-ear detective Mike Hammer, Kiss Me Deadly, is a dark surrealistic gem made by a director (Robert Aldrich) who loathed the brutal gumshoe.
Ironically, First Frost received an imprimatur from the actor David Jason, who incarnated the character on TV for so many years (and, it has to be said, softened the rough-tongued copper into someone more lovable); his words of praise for the novel have one wondering how closely he read it.
One of the many clever touches here is the strategy of taking the reader back to the detective’s early years. In recession-hit 1981 Britain, as the IRA plans its mainland campaign, workaholic DS Jack Frost (even at this younger age not noted for sartorial elegance or liberal opinions) is already an irritant for his superior, Superintendent Mullet. The alcoholic head of the CID has disappeared, but his booze-fuelled absences are habitual; a second disappearance, that of the second-in-command DI Allen, is perhaps more significant. Frost has his hands full with the chaotic state of the vermin-infested police station, missing colleagues and a 12-year-old girl who has been abducted from a department store. While the exact location of the fictional town of Denton is never established, the authors (in an interview on the Shots website) have stated that it is somewhere in the vicinity of Slough or Reading.
To those who study the entrails of such things, it’s no surprise that First Frost is so bitterly diverting. James Gurbutt is a publisher who worked for the late Wingfield’s original publishing house, and Henry Sutton, ex-literary editor of the Daily Mirror, has written several acerbically entertaining novels under his own name. The duo (now separated) show an effortless command of the idiom here, but perhaps their dislike of the protagonist, once described as ‘the most unattractive cop in mainstream crime fiction’, was the sand in the oyster that has produced this dark pearl.
The 15 books in DOROTHY SIMPSON’s eminently consistent Inspector Thanet series are set in Kent, and it is difficult to choose which one is the most representative. Perhaps a bid may be made for two titles: Puppet for a Corpse and Last Seen Alive – the latter, in fact, bagged the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger, a notable bauble.
Other writers and key books
CATHERINE AIRD: Little Knell, The Complete Steel
JO BANNISTER: Breaking Faith
VICTORIA BLAKE: Cutting Blades, Skin and Blister
GLENN CHANDLER: Dead Sight, Savage Tide
ELIZABETH CORLEY: Requiem Mass
LIZ EVANS: Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?, Sick As a Parrot
ELIZABETH HAYNES: Revenge of the Tide
DERYN LAKE: Dead on Cue, The Mills of God
AMY MYERS: Murder in Hell’s Corner, Classic in the Barn
MARK PETERSON: Flesh and Blood
PAULINE ROWSON: Undercurrent, Footsteps on the Shore
REBECCA WHITNEY: The Liar’s Chair
The Midlands
Is the following a Britain that you recognise? Violent confrontations between young black males in urban areas, which end up with somebody bleeding from a stab wound or a bullet? Or Eastern European pimps, trafficking vulnerable young women into this country for enforced sexual slavery? Or a police force hamstrung by constant accusations that they are not respecting the human rights of the criminals?
A Daily Mail editorial? No, this is the world we are taken into by one of the most respected writers in this country, whose record as poet and publisher consolidates his credentials as an unimpeachable part of the literary establishment. So when JOHN HARVEY presents this scarifying picture of Britain in his Nottingham- and London-set novel Cold in Hand, attention must be paid – in fact, reading this worrying but utterly trenchant book will be a more disquieting experience for readers of the Guardian than the Mail, as liberal shibboleths are toppled. With utterly unflinching rigour, Harvey strip-mines this dystopian society and renders the contemporary horrors with customary skill. Policewoman Lynn Kellogg is caught between brawling street gangs, and unwisely attempts to defuse the situation. The result is bloody mayhem: one young girl is mutilated, another lies dead, shot by a young man wearing a bandanna wrapped tightly round his head. The policewoman herself is shot and hospitalised. She is visited by her anxious lover, another copper – whose name happens to be Charlie Resnick. Now (Harvey fans may feel), we can relax. Good old Charlie, mainstay of the Nottingham police force, jazz lover, a man whose very presence reassures us that some kind of order can be brought out of the chaos. Such consolations, however, are not what John Harvey is dispensing in this book: at every opportunity, he snatches away from us the feeling that all could be made right in this worst of all possible worlds. The problems Charlie runs up against while investigating the death of the girl are only the tip of the iceberg, and some very nasty people traffickers are stirred into the lethal brew. As in so much of the best crime fiction, what we have here is basically a state of the nation novel, and Harvey repeatedly suggests that his own vision may have become as nihilistic as that of the sociopathic characters that populate Cold in Hand. But this is no hand-wringing tract – the book is quite possibly Harvey’s most authoritative in years: visceral, engaged and, yes, unputdownable. One hopes that Harvey’s announced retirement from the crime genre is temporary – readers would be sure to welcome more outings for Resnick, and for retired copper Frank Elder, who features in a more recent series.
Like Dickens’ fat boy, SJ BOLTON (aka Sharon Bolton) is in the business of making our flesh creep, and such books as Sacrifice demonstrated how comfortable she is with the orchestration of tension. Does your repertoire of quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche consist only of the shop-worn ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’? If so, it’s time to add a second quote that’s rapidly moving up the Nietzschean hit parade: the one about avoiding battling monsters for fear of becoming a monster yourself (and its chaser: if you gaze into the abyss, it will also gaze into you). The latter makes an appearance in Bolton’s frisson-generating Blood Harvest, and it’s hardly surprising that this particular aphorism is so popular with crime writers: after all, it’s basically a paradigm for 99 per cent of the genre in the twenty-first century. What makes Blood Harvest such a satisfyingly atmospheric 400-odd pages, however, is its clever synthesis of two sure-fire strategies: the slow-burning supernatural mystery in which the dark secret of a town or community is gradually uncovered by a vulnerable protagonist; and the dark psychological crime narrative.
The later Dead Scared is constructed in prismatic fashion, with each brief segment creating a chilling totality, and if the theme here is familiar – the mysterious suicides of undergraduate students – the treatment is decidedly original. The unfortunately named Detective Lacey Flint is handed a tough assignment. After a gruesome series of suicides at Cambridge University, involving immolation and decapitation, Flint is persuaded by her boss, DI Mark Joesbury, to go undercover and assume the role of a psychology undergraduate, working with the one person who will know her real identity: the psychologist Evi Oliver. Adopting a nervous, vulnerable persona, Flint is able to discover just what has driven so many female undergraduates to take their own lives. With the psychologist and her distant boss her only contact with the outside world, Flint’s initial confidence that she can deal with the situation is eroded when a truly terrifying onslaught of mass bullying comes her way. More than in previous books, Bolton utilises extremely brief chapters in the fashion of James Patterson, but (unlike Patterson) she never forgets that characterisation is equally important in a novel such as Dead Scared. She even freights in the device of unresolved sexual attraction; Flint and her boss Joesbury clearly belong in bed together, but frustratingly – both for them and for the reader – that consummation does not happen. But, as in the best work of Stephen King (a writer Bolton clearly admires), the balance of human sympathy and ever-accelerating disquiet is handled with real authority, building to a truly vertiginous climax.
STEPHEN BOOTH is a reliable, if unspectacular, author, and such books as Lost River suggest a writer of skill. The book begins with the tragic drowning of a young girl in the idyllic setting of Dovedale. Detective Ben Cooper witnesses the event but is unable to help – and as he gets to know the dead girl’s family, he discovers a well-hidden dark secret. Booth enjoys walking the hills of the Peak District, and the sense of place here is palpable. Such psychological thrillers as Blind to the Bones and Black Dog were already strong work from Booth, but Lost River is one of his most accomplished.
Set in a fictitious town (but probably in Derbyshire), SARAH WARD’s In Bitter Chill arrived with encomiums from a respected trio of writers: Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, William Ryan and Chris Ewan. This impressive crime debut is the work of a writer best known for the website Crime Pieces and as one of the Petrona Award judges for translated Scandinavian crime fiction. It’s a debut that hits the ground running, showing that the author has the measure of the exigencies of the police procedural and – more importantly – the conflicted psychology of her characters. The novel begins in 1978 with the disappearance of two young girls. One of them, Rachel Jones, returns, her memory of events fogged, and lives on to become a central character in the narrative. Her companion Sophie Jenkins is never found. Thirty years pass, and the suicide of the missing girl’s mother sets in train a sequence of new events that will have significant consequences for the damaged Rachel. While it is true to say that Sarah Ward does nothing radical with the apparatus of the crime novel, she proves to be highly adept at characterisation – notably of the unhappy Rachel – and passes with flying colours the test of making her team of coppers distinctive and vividly characterised. The dénouement, too, is unlikely to be guessed even by diehard aficionados of the genre.
The amiable MEL SHERRATT made something of a mark with Taunting the Dead, set in her native Stoke-on-Trent, and followed this up with a genuinely unsettling tale of a child’s game being given a sinister grown-up twist. The second book in the DS Allie Shenton sequence, Follow the Leader, begins with a man’s body being discovered on a canal tow path. In his pocket is a magnetic letter of the alphabet. Some days later, a second victim is discovered with the letter ‘D’ tucked into her clothing. It becomes clear to Allie and her team that, in order to track down a ruthless killer, they must play the eponymous children’s game. Sherratt’s work is direct, unfussy and involving.
For some considerable time, the hardworking ANN GRANGER has been consolidating her reputation as one of the most reliable practitioners of the crime fiction genre, a process continued with A Better Quality of Murder (though that book – and the others in her sequence featuring Lizzie Martin – has a Victorian setting, so is not for this study). She is content to work within the parameters of the field in her more contemporary series (of which she has three: Fran Varady, Campbell & Carter and Mitchell & Markby), but there is plenty of room for an author who consistently manages to ring the changes as satisfyingly as Granger does.
Other writers and key books
HELEN BLACK: Blood Rush, A Place of Safety
JENNY BLACKHURST: How I Lost You
MAUREEN CARTER: A Question of Despair, Dead Old
JEAN CHAPMAN: Deadly Serious, A Watery Grave
AJ CROSS: Art of Deception, Gone in Seconds
ROD DUNCAN: Backlash, Burnout
STEVEN DUNNE: The Unquiet Grave, The Reaper
PRISCILLA MASTERS: Smoke Alarm, A Fatal Cut
ANN PURSER: Sorrow on Sunday
CHARLIE WILLIAMS: One Dead Hen, King of the Road
The North West
New entries in the thriller field now have to be tougher than the rest in order to make their mark. This is something that the clubbable Liverpool-born ED CHATTERTON accomplishes effortlessly in A Dark Place to Die. Ed was educated at the same primary school as this writer, but that buys him no favours here (he doesn’t need them, anyway!). This key novel, vividly written, begins on a cold winter’s morning. DI Frank Keane is summoned to the scene of a crime on the shoreline of Liverpool. The body appears to be that of a man, but it has been systematically tortured and burned, and is now tied to a pole on the beach. With comparatively little evidence, Keane and his partner DS Emily Harris have a hunch that the killing is gang-related, and they begin an investigation that takes them into the dark world of organised crime. Chatterton is a notable and distinctive practitioner in the crime fiction field, and also works profitably in other genres.
The socially committed NICHOLAS BLINCOE made a considerable mark with the unorthodox Acid Casuals, taking the reader into a variety of threatening criminal milieus in the city of Manchester, a key stamping ground for the author. Blincoe has an intimate acquaintance with the trendy, sometimes minatory world of the Manchester club scene, awash with drugs and various unsavoury criminal types who control the nominal managers. The antihero of Acid Casuals is not your typical crime novel protagonist; he is a young man who samples this scene while concealing a secret identity: that of a Brazilian transsexual. She returns to Manchester for revenge on her old boss, and what follows is dark and quirky fare indeed. Blincoe is a notably political writer – less so here than usual, but his genre filigrees are welcome and unusual.
Merseyside is the customary haunt of RON ELLIS, with such efficient if unspectacular books as Grave Mistake; while staying in the business for years, Ellis has never made the breakthrough that many of his contemporaries have enjoyed. Heiress Joanna Smithson is abducted from a Liverpool car park, and her father, fearing the kidnappers’ actions if he involves the police, calls in DJ-cum-private eye Johnny Ace, counting on his celebrated problem-solving skills. But as soon as Johnny gets involved, Joanna kills one of her captors in self-defence, and she finds herself in court with the prosecution forging a case that presents her as a murderer. Johnny has his work cut out attempting to prove her innocence, and he has another case to tax him: he has been requested by a writer on the Wavertree Corinthians football team to find goalkeeper David Blease, who disappeared from Liverpool 20 years ago. Anybody who knows their Raymond Chandler know that any investigator simultaneously engaged on two cases is in for big trouble, and that’s certainly the case here. Ace, frankly, is an unlikely character, but he is markedly different from most bruisers in an overcrowded field. Ellis draws on his own DJ background to infuse his books with an authenticity that makes his frequently outrageous plotting plausible.
Still on Merseyside, KEVIN SAMPSON’s distinctive Clubland is set in a Liverpool every bit as dangerous as any American city: we are plunged into a sleazy ghetto of sex tourists, strippers and drug addicts, where life is every bit as cheap as on Elmore Leonard’s Delta. Sampson’s north of England setting in Clubland is marked by its narrow horizons constrained by placing the action between Runcorn and Birkenhead, via the mean streets of Liverpool. But the language here has all the demented idiosyncrasy of American writers, with violent criminal Ged Brennan’s first-person narration voicing his irritation with the young thugs stealing his thunder in a form of often impenetrable dialect that resembles nothing so much as a Scouse version of Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange (although viewers of the TV drama show Brookside may know that ‘keks’ are trousers). Sampson allows us little respite from his relentlessly unpleasant dramatis personae – even the progressive-minded Margo, with her visions of urban regeneration, is an unsympathetic character. Clubland is a deeply amoral immersion in a mean-spirited world, where the interlacing of cut-throat humour barely undercuts the omnipresent menace. Things have changed since Raymond Chandler’s day – now it would appear that British crime writers are quite as tough as the Yanks.
Killing the Beasts was a disturbing psychological thriller that dealt with ideas that also appeared in CHRIS SIMMS’ first two novels – compulsion and mental instability. The idea for his debut novel, 2003’s Outside the White Lines, came to him one night when broken down on the hard shoulder of a motorway. Staccato chapters alternate between the viewpoints of The Searcher, The Hunter and The Killer, each character roaming the roads of Britain in pursuit of his own obsessive agenda. Simms followed this up with another standalone, Pecking Order. Largely set on a battery farm, the plot follows the naïve but cruel Rubble who is duped into believing that he’s been enrolled as an agent on a sinister government project. Partly inspired by the 1960s experiments of Stanley Milgram into man’s obedience to authority, the novel also touches on such diverse issues as euthanasia and the ethics of factory farming. Simms then changed publishers with Killing the Beasts, which inaugurated the series featuring Manchester policeman DI Jon Spicer. Descended from the Irish immigrants who helped build the world’s first industrial city, Spicer never shies away from Manchester’s violent and lawless corners in his investigations. The novel is set during 2002, with the city’s hosting of that year’s Commonwealth Games providing a spectacular backdrop to the action. The plot revolves around a killer who, apart from sealing his victims’ airways with a viscous gel, leaves them totally unscathed.
The follow-up novel in the series, Shifting Skin, deals with an equally macabre killer (one who uses surgical skills to remove large swathes of his victims’ flesh), while Savage Moon contains multiple references to the horror classic An American Werewolf in London – the novel is concerned with a brutal killing that takes place on the notorious Saddleworth Moor, to the edge of the city. Simms attracts critical acclaim for the fashion in which he combines details of DI Spicer’s domestic life with pithy descriptions of police procedure and convincing glimpses into the minds of his (rather unlikely) killers.
The fact that the hard-working CATH STAINCLIFFE is among the most productive of crime novelists (in a variety of areas) does not alter the fact that she is one of the most imaginative and consistent writers in the field. That’s very much the case with her contributions – which she produces in tandem with her own dedicated work – to the novels based on the TV franchise Scott and Bailey. In titles such as Ruthless, Staincliffe develops Britain’s answer to the female cop team Cagney and Lacey with impressive new levels of psychological depth, as the duo investigates the death of a man in an abandoned chapel that has been set on fire.
The industrious BILL JAMES has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the most authoritative crime writers in Britain today, and each new book adds lustre to this reputation – it’s a mystery why (as yet) his sales don’t match those of many a far less talented author. But is life (or publishing) ever fair? In Girls, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles has been quietly tolerating the activities of drug lords Ralph Ember and Mansel Shale, as there are far more dangerous villains around. But when foreign dealers move on to the scene, the ante is upped for everyone – with spectacularly nasty results. This is another first-rate novel from the ever-reliable James, whose Play Dead appeared in 2013.
The very well-read MARTIN EDWARDS has enjoyed acclaim for a variety of endeavours, of which his day job (as a lawyer) is perhaps the least known. He is one of the UK’s premier crime fiction anthologists, as well as being a noted expert on the Golden Age of crime fiction; his most recent book on the subject arrived with an encomium from no less than Len Deighton. The Golden Age of Murder, subtitled ‘The mystery of the writers who invented the modern detective story’, is the first book about the prestigious Detection Club, the celebrated social networking/dining club for crime writers; it also doubles as an examination of the great Golden Age writers who energised the form, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. And there are few writers better qualified than the knowledgeable Edwards to tell the story, which stretches from the now distant past to the edgy present. It’s a picture of a little-known aspect of the cultural history of Great Britain.
Edwards’ own two crime fiction series, set in different locales, have proved to be both critically and commercially successful, notably the Harry Devlin novels set in Liverpool. Devlin, like his creator, is in the legal profession, and such books as Yesterday’s Papers offer both the diversions of crime fiction and vivid scene-setting of a high order. His second series is set in the Lake District and features a female and a male protagonist, policewoman Hannah Scarlett and historian Daniel Kind; the first book of the sequence was The Coffin Trail. The Dungeon House, the most recent in the series at the time of writing, sports Edwards’ usual expertise.
NEIL WHITE’s series of five books featuring crime reporter Jack Garrett and detective Laura McGanity enjoyed considerable acclaim. However, his fifth book in the series, Cold Kill, was followed by a standalone book, Beyond Evil, before a move to a new publisher saw him launch his new series with Next to Die. Once again, it featured two principal characters whose jobs put them in conflict, this time two brothers: Sam and Joe Parker, one a detective, the other a defence lawyer. The third book, The Domino Killer, begins with a man found beaten to death in a Manchester park. Then Detective Sam Parker discovers that the victim’s fingerprints were found at another crime scene. This is more authentic, gritty crime writing from Neil White, who still works as a criminal lawyer as well as being a bestselling writer of crime fiction. His work has a real sense of palpable threat, something that is all too lacking in many contemporary crime novels.
LUCA VESTE enjoys an unusual heritage for a crime writer, an intriguing combination of Italy and Liverpool. The companionable writer studied psychology and criminology at the University of Liverpool and has edited the anthologies Off the Record and True Brit Grit. The caustic Dead Gone was a strikingly original debut, with a particular gift for characterisation and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a notable skill at evoking his native city (into which he freights some cogent social commentary). Veste also sports a pronounced taste for the macabre, which is given full rein in such books as The Dying Place and Bloodstream. Part psychological thrillers, part police procedurals, the Murphy and Rossi novels take in both sides of a contrasting city, exploring the changing landscape of Liverpool. In Bloodstream, mavens of social media Chloe Morrison and Joe Hooper are enjoying their celebrity when it is cruelly snatched away from them, along with their lives. Hard-bitten coppers DI David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi are to find that there is something rotten not just in the world of social media but in the police force itself. Astringent and artfully constructed crime writing that reinvigorates the shop-worn police procedural format.
CONRAD WILLIAMS – whose fiction leans towards the darker end of the spectrum – wrote Dust and Desire as an homage to Derek Raymond, whose Factory series left a deep impression upon him. The book deals with the dedication of youth versus the dogged determination of middle age, all underpinned by various familial tragedies. Dust and Desire attempts to limn the ugly urban jungles of the city with profane humour and a poetic style. The action takes place primarily in London, and is delivered from the driven protagonist Joel Sorrell’s point of view, but episodes from the antagonist’s past in Liverpool take up part of the novel, with the climactic scene acted out on the shed roof of St Pancras station.
Other writers and key books
TOM BENN: Chamber Music, The Doll Princess
PAULA DALY: The Mistake I Made
JM GREGSON: A Little Learning, Least of Evils
MANDASUE HELLER: Lost Angel, The Game
PHIL LOVESEY: The Screaming Tree
SARAH RAYNE: The Death Chamber, Tower of Silence
The North East
Not many writers have done it, but DAVID PEACE single-handedly forged a new crime genre: Yorkshire Noir. In 1999, the bitter Nineteen Seventy Four inaugurated his Red Riding Quartet, with the pungent Nineteen Seventy Seven the second book in the series. Like the first novel, the book vividly evokes the period and the corruption that was endemic in the police force during that time. Peace’s troubled protagonists, policeman Bob Fraser and cynical reporter Jack Whitehead, are the reader’s guides through a society where justice is always hard to find. Peace’s youth in Ossett during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper imbued him with memories that continued to haunt him and supplied the basis and inspiration for the quartet. Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) were equally provocative and disturbing, showing that invention was still possible in an exhausted genre.
Surprisingly, Peace demonstrated that he could create another sequence of breadth and ambition – and Occupied City, the second part of his Tokyo trilogy continues the momentum of the first book, Tokyo Year Zero. The contrast with the earlier Yorkshire-set sequence could not be more extreme – except for a similarly dark and merciless view of humanity. The book marries a sweeping historical canvas with a tough crime narrative.
Many crime scribes lie awake at night, casting around for an innovation – any innovation – that will reinvigorate the genre. After all, hasn’t everything been done? Alcoholic copper struggling with messy private life? Police superiors who try to bury inconvenient cases? And – most egregious cliché of all – the conflict between a cynical male copper and his put-upon female colleague (who always, of course, shows that she is no pushover)? PETER ROBINSON has discovered the perfect solution to this irksome problem for crime writers: he takes the clashing male/female copper motif and shoots it full of adrenaline, always finding some new wrinkle to convince us that we are encountering this scenario for the very first time. All the Colours of Darkness, one of the most distinctive books in his sequence featuring DCI Alan Banks and his associate DI Annie Cabbot, is a salutary reminder why readers are so comfortable with the series: it’s an old friend, but a friend that can still come up with the odd provocative remark to pique our attention. A body is discovered, and the copper in charge (this time, Annie Cabbot) is forced to call in her reluctant superior (a notably pissed-off Alan Banks) when it becomes apparent that the killing is something very unusual: it appears to be a double death involving gay partners. Mark Hardcastle, a popular set designer for a Yorkshire theatre, is found hanging near a river. When Annie calls upon his partner, Laurence Silbert, at the couple’s expensive house, she finds him lying among the Chagalls and Kandinskys, his head beaten to a pulp. Is it a murder followed by a suicide? Both Banks and Cabbot are too wily to accept such an easy solution, and they begin digging into some very clandestine areas where all moral parameters are nebulous, and everyone involved – both police and suspects – appears to be in danger.
Is it a compliment to say that reading a Peter Robinson novel is like slipping into a well-worn pair of slippers? Certainly, the reader can relax in the knowledge that all the buttons we expect to be pressed when savouring a police procedural will be satisfyingly pushed, and the comforting rituals of the experience all duly namechecked by a consummate professional. But Robinson also has a way of undercutting the quotidian familiarity of the genre, and, with a deceptively unspectacular use of language, he sets about the process of thoroughly unsettling the reader. Robinson is also, of course, a man who does plotting with assurance – the kind of plotting, in fact, that exerts a considerable grip.
Slowly but surely, JOHN BAKER’s series featuring the tenacious Sam Turner acquired much favourable word-of-mouth, with Poet in the Gutter and Death Minus Zero nosing ahead in the popularity stakes (though we haven’t heard much from him lately – he appears to have forsaken the genre). Baker struck out at a tangent in the Hull-set The Chinese Girl, with a narrative so rich with menace that readers didn’t miss the absent Turner. Released from jail, Stone Lewis is trying to change his wasted life into something positive. Ill-advised tattoos on his face have people shying away from him as he wanders the outside world, and when he finds a battered Asian girl in the doorway of his insalubrious basement room, it isn’t long before he’s firmly back in the dangerous morass that he had tried to escape. We’ve read a million versions of the ex-con pulled back unwillingly into the criminal world before, but rarely delivered with the exuberance that Baker demonstrates here. He’s also particularly skilful at marrying the disparate worlds of the American tough-guy thriller with the English novel of cold-eyed social observation. The cleverest trick here is making the non-tattooed reader identify so closely with the hapless Lewis, and we follow his dangerous odyssey with total attention. The danger is offset by Baker’s trademark wit, and the novel was a welcome break from the Sam Turner series.
On Dangerous Ground? Well, one can forgive LESLEY HORTON cheekily re-using a title that firmly belongs to a famous noir movie. This book is very different from the earlier Snares of Guilt; it is a socially engaged piece in which all the minute observation is quite as important as the steadily accelerating thriller plot. The city of Bradford has a stated policy: there is no child prostitution crisis to deal with, as the problem doesn’t exist. But DI John Handford and Sergeant Khalid Ali know that things are not quite that simple. A young girl and young boy are savagely murdered, and the two detectives find themselves in the middle of a truly disturbing criminal web in which children are becoming inextricably enmeshed in the city’s lower depths, while the establishment attempts to draw a veil over the unacceptable facts. Horton herself has long experience of the issues she deals with here, and they are handled responsibly and intelligently but never at the expense of compelling writing. She is good on the racial clashes of the city, and while the ending may be discernible early on to the alert reader, the marriage of sociological observation and good thriller writing is accomplished.
Many of the best crime fiction novelists – from Elmore Leonard to Donald Westlake (when writing as Richard Stark) – are well aware that the withholding of moral judgements on their violent characters is a risky endeavour. It’s undoubtedly true that stripped-down prose about totally amoral characters performing lethal actions can have an exhilarating effect, but those readers who are not criminals themselves (the majority, one would have thought) might be likely to find themselves alienated from such protagonists. But when the trick can be pulled off, the result can be writing that leaps off the page in its lacerating forcefulness. This is very much the case with HOWARD LINSKEY’s The Drop, a classic British gangster novel that evokes and matches some of the best writing in the genre, notably the iconic Jack’s Return Home (Get Carter) by the late Ted Lewis, in its use of an unromanticised Newcastle setting. In fact, it’s a measure of Linskey’s audacity to go up against Lewis in using a milieu that was so thoroughly colonised by the earlier novel, but such is Linskey’s authority that we admire both his chutzpah and his ability to stand comparison with any of his predecessors. White-collar criminal David Blake works for the gangster Bobby Mahoney, relishing his comfortable lifestyle. But then a lot of money – the eponymous ‘drop’ – goes astray, and Blake finds himself in the frame, with potentially extremely dangerous results. All of this is handled with great panache, and it’s clear that Linskey is a writer worthy of attention. Simon Kernick – no slouch himself in this area – has said: ‘The Drop is a brutal, hard-hitting debut which opens up Newcastle’s dark, violent underbelly like a freshly-sharpened stiletto.’
There were those who feared that Linskey’s move to another publisher might draw his sting, with journos and policemen rather than criminals now at the centre of the narrative. Did it? Thankfully, not an iota; No Name Lane is lacerating fare that begins with a killer at his gruesome work and makes most current crime fiction look like thin gruel. Disgraced reporter Tom Carney returns to the North East, encountering Helen Norton, who is holding down his old job on the local paper. The duo investigate the disappearances of young girls, together with beleaguered policeman Ian Bradshaw. However, the first body to be found is not one of the girls, but a decades-old corpse. Does a murder from the past have a connection with an implacable monster of the present day? No Name Lane clocks in at a weighty 500 pages, but never falters in its grip.
Men fear death as children fear the dark, said Francis Bacon. In SIMON LELIC’s provocative (and contentious) The Child Who, children and death are chillingly combined in a juvenile dispenser of murder. Actually, there is a lengthy lineage of British writers specialising in malevolent children: John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, for instance, renders the prepubescent killers alien and ‘other’ – and to some degree (without relying on supernatural or science-fiction trappings) that is precisely what Lelic does here. The eponymous child is a mystery – but more tellingly so is the instinct that drives a provincial solicitor to risk the destruction of his own family in defence of the boy. The author’s earlier books, Rupture and The Facility, showed a readiness to tackle deeply uncomfortable issues; the former dealt with a teacher murdering his pupils and a colleague in a school shooting, and questioned whether apparently psychopathic behaviour might have a more nuanced explanation than tabloid newspapers are wont to accept. But Lelic’s unconventional take on such issues as bullying and alienated children in Rupture now appears to be a dry run for The Child Who, in which the reader’s capacity for either outrage or sympathy is uneasily manipulated by the author. Is Lelic’s child here ‘evil’? Or is that word a useful catch-all term for the inexplicable?
Daniel is an unassuming 12-year-old boy who has committed a terrible crime: he has savagely killed a schoolmate, a young girl – and the reader is not spared a grim violation. Solicitor Leo Curtice is assigned the job of defending him, but his task is to have a seismic effect on his own life. Leo is under no illusions about the horror of the crime here, but shows an intuitive sympathy for the boy, perceiving that Daniel is a damaged, vulnerable victim himself, quite as much as the classmate he murdered. But extending sympathy to a perpetrator of abuse is dangerous territory, and, in a parallel with a real-life case, the reader is reminded of the hate-filled public perceptions of the murderers of James Bulger when attempts were made to present them as victims of abuse themselves. Is Leo right to risk the love and respect of his own family working out a personal agenda, however laudable? The answer to that is not to be vouchsafed in The Child Who; Lelic places such conclusions within the individual conscience of the reader. And it is that as much as anything else which shows that Lelic is a writer of note.
If you’re looking for cosy, comforting crime fiction, it may be best if you stay away from DAVID MARK. Cosy he isn’t. Mark’s approach to the police procedural thriller is uncompromising – as Dark Winter and Original Skin resoundingly proved – and Sorrow Bound, a solid outing for DS Aector McAvoy is more of the same. The three individuals at the heart of the plot – McAvoy, his wife Roisin and Philippa Longman – have one thing in common: a mysterious enemy dedicated to their destruction. As the narrative moves inexorably towards its compelling climax, it’s easy to see why such writers as Val McDermid and Steve Mosby are lining up to praise Mark.
Over the course of several novels, MARI HANNAH has proved herself to be an accomplished modern crime writer, and Monument to Murder is one of the most sheerly enjoyable of her books. A skeleton is discovered beneath the fortified walls of an old castle in Northumberland. In order to identify the body, DCI Kate Daniels enlists the aid of a forensic anthropologist. At the same time, prison psychologist Emily McCann (who has just lost her husband) finds herself dangerously inveigled into a convicted sex offender’s fantasy, with disturbing mind games the unpleasant order of the day. Another resolute winner from the talented Hannah.
In Black Flowers by STEVE MOSBY, out of nowhere, a little girl appears on a seaside promenade holding a black flower. She has a frightening story to tell. But the story she relates will have dark consequences, and will claim a variety of victims. When Neil Dawson’s father takes his own life, Neil is crushed by the event. But even as he comes to terms with his grief, he realises that there is a mystery he is obliged to solve. At the same time, Hannah Price is also mourning the death of her father – like him, she has joined the police force. For both protagonists, a journey into the past is to have the most grave and profound effects. Those who know their crime fiction have long been aware that Steve Mosby is one of the most interesting and ambitious of current practitioners, and this 2012 book is well up to his customary impressive standard. The book is not set in a specific real place, although the two main locations are roughly based on Leeds and Whitby. The more recent I Know Who Did It is equally accomplished. Charlie Matheson was killed two years ago in a car accident. So how can a woman who resembles Charlie – and who claims to be her – return from the dead? Detective Mark Nelson is called in to investigate and hears her terrifying account of what she has endured in the ‘afterlife’.
Let’s be frank, a great deal of work in the crime fiction field reads like a great deal of other work, so it is particularly refreshing when a very individual writer appears on the scene. Such as NICK QUANTRILL, whose prose is subtly unlike that of most of his contemporaries. His protagonist is doughty private investigator Joe Geraghty, whose area of operation is a pungently realised Hull in East Yorkshire. All of his work is worth investigating, but perhaps his signature book is The Crooked Beat, which frequently invokes the great private eye novels of the past.
Like the first two books in Liverpool-born KATE ELLIS’s Joe Plantagenet series, Seeking the Dead and Playing with Bones, Kissing the Demons is set in the ancient northern city of Eborby (a thinly disguised York). And as York is reputed to be the most haunted city in England, there is inevitably a supernatural element to her mysteries. Ellis’s initial inspiration for Kissing the Demons arose from a conversation with her son’s girlfriend, who had rented a rundown Victorian house with some friends. As the weeks went on, the house’s occupants found that the place had a rather peculiar atmosphere. During her time there, formerly close friends would suddenly quarrel for no apparent reason and relationships broke down, so much so that it almost felt as if some hostile presence in the house were starting to control their lives. As well as all this, when a strip of wallpaper came away in the bathroom, the students found what looked like a bloodstain underneath. So, in Kissing the Demons, 13 Torland Place is a student house with a disturbing past. Not only was it the scene of five brutal murders back in the nineteenth century, but it was also linked to the disappearance of two teenage girls 12 years before the story begins. As with her earlier Plantagenet books, Ellis has been unable to resist mining York’s rich seam of chilling ghost stories. But these elements aside, Kate Ellis’s complete body of work is satisfyingly full of expertly turned, involving crime narratives. She’s unquestionably the real deal.
DAVID STUART DAVIES is one of the world’s leading experts on Sherlock Holmes (in fact, he and I recently co-edited The Sherlock Holmes Book). At university in the 1970s, he wanted to write his final dissertation on Arthur Conan Doyle but was told that the author was not important enough for such a project. As an antidote to this literary snobbery, Davies began writing an article on the films of Sherlock Holmes for his own pleasure. The article grew into a book and became Holmes of the Movies, published in 1976. He followed this with several ingenious examples of Sherlockian pastiche – not for discussion here, as the subject of Brit Noir is not historical crime fiction (although honourable mention should be made of The Tangled Skein) – and books featuring his own sleuth, Johnny One Eye, a young private detective operating in London during the Second World War. With Innocent Blood, we can forgive Davies borrowing a title from PD James: this second in a series of books based in 1980s Huddersfield is a gritty and involving crime thriller that explores a variety of themes, including stalking, murder and homophobia within the police force. Location is crucially important to the story and the book has a strong local connection; Davies has drawn on many Yorkshire landmarks that are still recognisable today. A child’s body is found in woodland, but this is only the first victim in a series of apparently motiveless crimes. DI Paul Snow must discover the pattern among the victims and juggle his own hectic private life or face the terrifying consequences.
Early in his writing career Crime Time magazine described STUART PAWSON as ‘Yorkshire’s best-kept secret’. It was a description he was anxious to leave behind. His first full-length crime novel, 1995’s The Picasso Scam, introduced Charlie Priest, the detective inspector who has featured in all Pawson’s work so far. He is an art school graduate – and Pawson now does all his painting vicariously, via Priest. The intention was to make him a zany character who always did the right thing for the wrong reasons; however, it proved difficult to maintain this, and Charlie soon became his own man and developed his own unique personality. Priest is unusual among fictional detectives: he has a good relationship with his senior officers (he does the dirty work and gets results) and even believes in doing the paperwork (‘Paperwork catches crooks,’ he tells his troops), although he has been known to break this rule himself. Pawson enjoys relating the locker-room banter that leavens the grimness of the main storylines. The Mushroom Man overcame the ‘difficult second book’ hurdle and became a success in a very short time. And by the twelfth book in the series, Grief Encounters, reviewers held Pawson’s work in high esteem. The author lives in Yorkshire, and although he tries to avoid the Professional Yorkshireman syndrome, he enjoys using the landscape as a background to his stories.
MARTYN WAITES is a brave man: he had the temerity to take on the UK’s leading ghost story practitioner Susan Hill by writing a sequel to the latter’s The Woman in Black – and turned in a very creditable job (Waites is something of a horror aficionado). He is also – in metrosexual fashion – ‘Tania Carver’, writing several books under this name in collaboration with his ex-wife Linda. In the Carver book Heartbreaker, after years of abuse, Gemma Adderley has finally plucked up the courage to leave her violent husband. She takes her seven-year-old daughter Carly and leaves the house, determined to salvage what she can of her life. But en route to Safe Harbour, a women’s refuge, she disappears… However, Waites’ work under his own name is his most impressive achievement: tough, authoritative novels that have a distinctive, gritty character. Born Under Punches, with its background of the Miners’ Strike of 1984, is among his best work.
Real life has always heavily influenced the under-regarded JOHN DEAN’s writing. For him, stories come out of experience. A typical novel, The Secrets Man, was generated by a serious illness experienced by the writer’s father; as Dean sat at his bedside day after day, he started to look around the hospital ward and to examine his surroundings. What he saw was five other beds, five other patients, each of them in a world of their own – and the idea for this novel germinated. What if one of the patients in a fictional hospital was an elderly villain who, in his heyday, had been the henchman of one of the city’s gang leaders, who was still active in the criminal underworld? What if the elderly villain was known as ‘The Secrets Man’ because he was the only one entrusted with the confidences of the gang leader? What if, as illness unhinged his mind, his tongue was loosened and he started revealing those secrets? And what if everyone dismissed his ramblings as just that – except for the retired detective in the next bed who knew exactly what he was hearing? Dean’s work is always full of invention, and that quality is fully in play in this key book. In A Breach of Trust, a crooked businessman suffers a fall at home and there is no reason to think it is anything other than an accident – until after he dies, when information emerges that points towards murder. DCI John Blizzard and his team are brought in to investigate and attention quickly focuses on the controversial closure of a local factory amid claims of widespread fraud and exploitation of the workforce. The detectives enter a world in which threats and intimidation are rife and hatred is never far from the surface. Dean sets his DCI John Blizzard books (such as this one) in the depressed fictional northern city of Hafton, while his Jack Harris novels are sited in the North Pennines.
Other writers and key books
PAULINE BELL: Nothing but the Truth, Reasonable Death
BEN CHEETHAM: Justice for the Damned
JOHN CONNOR: The Playroom, Falling
PATRICIA HALL: Devil’s Game
BILL KITSON: Minds that Hate, Altered Egos
REBECCA MUDDIMAN: Stolen
SHEILA QUIGLEY: Thorn in My Side, Every Breath You Take
DANIELLE RAMSAY: Blood Reckoning
NICHOLAS RHEA: The Sniper, Constable on View
The West Country
Apart from recently reactivating Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot franchise, SOPHIE HANNAH writes highly involving contemporary thrillers, set in a fictional UK town, that blend the psychological suspense genre with the police procedural. She has said: ‘I wanted to combine the direct, visceral appeal of the first-person woman-in-peril narrative with recurring police characters whom readers would get to know better with each book.’ Hannah’s detectives are DC Simon Waterhouse, who has never, to his colleagues’ knowledge, had a romantic or sexual relationship, and Sergeant Charlotte (Charlie) Zailer, who is mouthy, promiscuous, and in love with Waterhouse. Their relationship evolves over the course of the books. In Little Face, Hannah’s first crime novel (a debut that effortlessly rose above the plethora of first crime books), a woman claims that her newborn has been swapped for another baby, and nobody believes her. Hannah’s second thriller, Hurting Distance is the story of a woman who, in order to persuade the police to search for her missing lover with the urgency she feels is required, pretends he is a sadistic psychopath, thinking they will look for him more assiduously if they believe he is a danger to others. And in The Other Half Lives, the protagonist confesses to the murder of a woman who is still alive.
You’re a woman with a happyish marriage, balancing a demanding job and an equally demanding young family, not greatly helped by your self-involved husband who routinely misreads your moods. You’re watching television when a name in a news item leaps out at you: Mark Bretherick. You know this man – and details of the report confirm this. But you conceal this from your husband, for two very salient reasons: you had a brief, clandestine sexual relationship with Bretherick, and (more disturbingly) his wife and daughter are both dead, brutally murdered. Oh, and there’s one more thing: the grieving widower on the screen is not the man you knew as Mark Bretherick… This is the premise of Hannah’s The Point of Rescue – and when did you last encounter such an unusual situation? But the fresh and original have been Hannah’s hallmarks from her debut novel onwards. Here, we are thoroughly involved in the chaotic life of the heroine, Sally Thorning. The novel starts with a bang (literally), as Sally is violently harangued by a childminder she has upset, then is pushed in front of a bus. Is the childminder responsible? Already, Sophie Hannah is scattering a host of clever and subtle touches such as Sally’s response as she falls (‘I am lying in between my handbag and the bus, and it occurs to me that this is good, that I am a barrier – my phone and diary would not get crushed…’). But it’s not just the observation of small, absurd (but plausible) details such as this that grips. Sally, for obvious reasons, is unwilling to reveal her relationship with her erstwhile lover, and anonymously informs the police that something is very strange about this whole situation. And as the revelations about ‘Mark Bretherick’ tumble forth, the tension is screwed ever tighter.
Hannah is also a best-selling, prize-winning poet – her collection, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award – although most crime readers would be happy if she never wooed that particular muse again.
The late Ed McBain semi-inaugurated the forensics genre in his 87th Precinct novels, but two female American writers have parlayed his innovations into stratospheric sales: Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. But the field has not become an exclusively female sorority – or, for that matter, an American one. A highly talented male writer has offered a challenge to the female domination of the genre, albeit playing safe by using a woman protagonist. The Coroner by MR HALL was an instant hit when it appeared in 2009, with his vulnerable heroine Jenny Cooper (a divorcée who has suffered a nervous breakdown) struggling with a new job as coroner for the Severn Vale – with the aid of self-administered medication. In The Flight, the eponymous ‘flight’ is that of a plane that has crashed into the Severn estuary, wiping out its passengers – who, it transpires, are a particularly prestigious assembly. Another inadvertent casualty of the crash appears to be a solitary sailor whose boat was sunk. But when his body washes up, alongside it is that of a ten-year-old girl, Amy Patterson, who was listed as a passenger on the plane. Jenny Cooper finds that the girl appears to bear no injuries from the crash – in fact, she died separately several hours later. The crash investigation is carried out under conditions of the greatest secrecy, and Jenny’s attempts to find out who is behind what appears to be a massive cover-up are further complicated by the demands of the dead girl’s mother, insistent that Jenny finds out the truth. It appeared that MR Hall had decided to broaden his canvas with this fourth outing for his vulnerable protagonist, still dependent on prescription drugs. She is coming to terms with the nervous breakdown that we read about in the first book, The Coroner, but is still relatively fragile. Here, she is up against particularly dangerous and influential opponents, but the risky strategy of maximising the odds against her pays off. We are never given the dispiriting impression that the rules of blockbuster thrillers have been trotted out as a result of some editor’s commercial suggestion; the book remains personal despite its larger, less focused concerns.
It is fortunate that most of us are not placed in the position of having to sacrifice our happiness in an ongoing battle with corruption. Hall’s coroner heroine would clearly be sympathetic to Tolstoy’s notion that his hero was truth – though the pursuit of truth has cost her dearly, and her delicate mental state has been stretched ever tighter over the course of an increasingly impressive series. The Chosen Dead is slightly different from its predecessors in that Hall places his stress on a particularly intricate narrative rather than on the travails of his beleaguered, substance-abusing protagonist; in fact, she has a slightly easier time of it in this book than her creator has previously allowed her. Cover-ups are often at the centre of Hall’s work, but while, in real life, most of us roll our eyes at the various conspiracy theories trotted out by the paranoid, readers of crime fiction have to accept such things – a belief in the slew of nasty conspiracies at the heart of the genre is as essential as a temporary belief in the existence of the Greek gods when watching Medea or Oedipus Rex.
While GRAHAM HURLEY cannot be said to have done anything radical with the standard form of the police procedural during his long career, his level of consistency has remained remarkably high, with such books as Touching Distance laying out an involving narrative with maximum clarity and vividness. In Sins of the Father, a wealthy elderly man, Rupert Moncrieff, dies after a savage beating in his West Country waterside mansion. A hood has been placed over his head and his throat cut. His extended family – who were still living with him – have a variety of personal stories as well as their own motives for his death. In charge of the murder investigation is DS Jimmy Suttle, who, working with his estranged journalist wife Lizzie, is still coping with his own problems after the abduction and murder of the couple’s young daughter Grace.
At one time, it looked as if MINETTE WALTERS would seize the crown of Britain’s crime queen from the long-time joint holders Ruth Rendell and PD James, but her lengthy sabbatical (broken in 2015 with a short novel) rendered her essentially hors de combat. However, her impressive earlier work remains relevant. After the socially engaged Acid Row, her ninth novel, Fox Evil, had the kind of psychological acuity that readers had come to expect from her. An elderly woman is found dead in her garden, dressed only in a nightgown, with bloodstains on the ground nearby. In the frame for her death is her landowning husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox, and in the close-knit Dorset village in which the book is set, his guilt is a fait accompli. All of this is handled with maximum efficiency by Walters.
Walters has been building a total picture of modern Britain that cuts across all social strata, while still using the apparatus of the crime novel. Since pocketing the John Creasey Award for her debut novel, The Ice House in 1992, Walters’ books have demonstrated her assurance in writing about a variety of groups (from the upper classes to council estate residents), while Disordered Minds reached into darker areas of the human psyche and The Devil’s Feather tackled a more ambitious international panoply than before. In the latter book, five women have been savagely killed in Sierra Leone, and Connie Burns, who works as a correspondent for Reuters, expresses doubts when three youthful rebel soldiers are arraigned for the crimes. But her objections are disregarded – this is, after all, a murderous civil war in which the slaughter has been wholesale, and the fate of three brutalised children forced into phoney confessions is academic. Connie comes to believe that the killer is a foreigner with sadistic sexual predilections, cutting his own bloody swathe under the cover of a war-torn country. Burrowing into seclusion in Dorset, Connie knows all too well that her safety is fragile, and that a final, horrific confrontation is inevitable. Walters has a readiness to tackle larger themes than many of her more parochial English peers, and she is a writer who has always been read by men (some other female crime writers often tend to target a female readership), but with this book she resolutely joined such American specialists in the extreme as Tess Gerritsen, whose books feature female protagonists in scenarios that are perfectly tough enough for the most astringent male tastes.
But (as suggested above) mention of Walters’ name always provokes a question: whatever happened to her? There was a time when her highly accomplished novels marked her out as the heir apparent to the two Baronesses, but then Walters seemed to vanish from the scene. By all accounts, she’s been writing a magnum opus, but it certainly wasn’t the book that appeared after her long literary hiatus: The Cellar. Not only is this a slim novella, it is only tangentially crime and arrives under the imprimatur of the Hammer imprint, specialists in the horrific. Is it substantial enough to end the Minette Walters drought? The theme here is domestic slavery. Muna lives in a dark cellar, exploited by the heartless Songoli family. But worms have a way of turning – particularly as Muna is not the illiterate drudge she appears to be. At just 200-odd pages, this is certainly a compulsive (and gruesome) read, but it also suggests that perhaps Walters has relinquished (if she ever harboured it) the notion of inheriting the James/Rendell crown.
Set on the North Devon coast, CHRISTINE POULSON’s Invisible features a protagonist, Lisa, who is in need of an escape from the demands of caring on her own for a son with cerebral palsy – and she has found this escape in a lover whose name is Jay. She meets him once a month and loses herself in a realm without responsibility – until one day when Jay does not appear, and Lisa discovers that the relationship is built on a lie. This is splendidly written fare from the reliable Poulson, written with keen psychological insight.
In STUART PREBBLE’s The Insect Farm, Jonathan and Roger Maguire are brothers, and each has an obsession. Jonathan is fixated on his seductive girlfriend Harriet, while Roger is constructing something very strange in a shed in their parents’ garden: his own private universe, with a collection of millions of insects. But as this suggests, Roger is somewhat off the spectrum of normal behaviour, and after the death of their parents, his brother is obliged to give up his studies and look after him – forcing him to live apart from his beloved Harriet. This is a recipe for jealousy, and soon violent death is in the offing. Stuart Prebble is best known as a broadcast journalist, but has proved to be a protean and talented writer with this sturdy novel (reminiscent of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory); it’s a gripping read.
PETER LOVESEY’s immensely enjoyable crime novels include Victorian period crime as well as contemporary police procedurals, all delivered in the author’s quirky, engaging style. His novelist career began when he won a publisher’s contest in 1970, granting him the chance to publish his first book, Wobble to Death, with his Victorian copper Sergeant Cribb. Subsequently, Lovesey produced another eight outings for Cribb, each one focusing on particular elements of Victorian society. In Stagestruck, over-the-hill pop star Clarion Calhoun is attempting to launch an acting career, but her debut at the Bath Theatre Royal gives her and the audience more than they bargained for. As she is rushed to hospital with third-degree burns, the theatrical community is thrown into uproar. It is up to the city’s most intuitive detective, Peter Diamond, to look into the case, but there is a problem – his physical aversion to the theatre itself.
Who is the real SUSAN HILL? Is she Britain’s best exponent of the classic ghost story? (An adaptation of her chilling novel The Woman in Black has been playing on the West End stage since 1989.) Or is she the heir apparent of Anthony Trollope? (Her The Shadows in the Street is crammed full of wonderful ecclesiastical squabbles, like Barchester Towers, with high and low church at each other’s throats.) Or is Hill a practitioner of the police procedural novel, with a determined copper struggling to keep a difficult murder investigation on course? Actually, she is all three – and is equally adroit at whatever genre she turns her hand to. This is proved by The Shadows in the Street, an outing for her detective Simon Serrailler, which manages to steer a satisfying middle line between a series of brutal crimes (in which prostitutes have been targeted) and the Cathedral Close disagreements mentioned above. Whether Hill is dealing with the sex trade or church politics, we are never impatient to return to the other plot strand.
Serrailler is on holiday after some particularly bruising cases, but his attempt to recharge his batteries is abruptly cut short when two prostitutes are strangled in Lafferton (Serrailler’s beat – though entirely fictional, Hill has compared it with Exeter or Salisbury). There is a host of suspects, including a variety of the women’s punters and the college librarian, ‘Loopy Les’, who supplies the sex workers with sandwiches and tea at night. The punters are mostly regulars and are trusted by the working girls – but is one of them harbouring a secret psychopathic hatred of women?
As ever with Hill, the crime-solving aspects of the book are firmly under her belt, although it might be argued that Serrailler’s team of detectives is sketched in more rudimentary fashion than usual. But the notable achievement of The Shadows in the Street can be found in the entertaining church-based squabbles involving the local Dean’s wife Ruth (whose nickname, Mrs Proudie, is borrowed from Trollope) and the sympathetically detailed description of the lives of the prostitutes. The latter, with their forlorn dreams of a new life, are presented without any lofty moralising, but Hill never draws a veil over the more squalid aspects of their lives. If the book’s denouement arrives rather out of left field, few will complain: Susan Hill’s Serrailler novels, with their persuasive copper and his equally well-rounded family, are real treats.
All but one of the prolific HAZEL HOLT’s 20-odd Mrs Malory books maintain a commendable level of consistency. Her preferred setting is West Somerset, with locales based on Minehead (aka Taviscombe). A favourite of the author’s own sizeable corpus of work is A Necessary End.
Other writers and key books
JANE ADAMS: Blood Ties, The Power of One
TOM BALE: Blood Falls
DAMIEN BOYD: Kickback, As the Crow Flies
CAROL ANNE DAVIS: Kiss it Away
MARGARET DUFFY: Rat Poison, Prospect of Death
DEBBY FOWLER: Letting Go, Intensive Care
LESLEY GRANT-ADAMSON: Undertow, Patterns in the Dust
SIMON HALL: The TV Detective, The Death Pictures
PETER HELTON: Four Below, Falling More Slowly
STAN HEY: Sudden Unprovided Death
DAVID HODGES: Firetrap, Slice
JANET LAURENCE: Death and the Epicure, Recipe for Death
JESSICA MANN: The Voice from the Grave
FERGUS McNEILL: Knife Edge, Eye Contact
ROBERT RICHARDSON: The Dying of the Light
BETTY ROWLANDS: Smokescreen, Finishing Touch
MARK SENNEN: Touch, Bad Blood
REBECCA TOPE: The Sting of Death, A Cotswold Killing
East Anglia
Since Behind the Scenes at the Museum (which deservedly won the Whitbread Book of the Year award), KATE ATKINSON has acquired a dedicated following of readers who wait for each new offering with keen anticipation. And Atkinson – so far – hasn’t disappointed, delivering the same cool and effortless prose that distinguished both that book and the equally beguiling Human Croquet. Part of the pleasure with each new book is the anticipation in wondering: what has she come up with this time? Surprisingly, Case Histories could almost be seen as a crime novel (a genre one would hardly expect the uncategorisable Atkinson to tackle), but the similarities are superficial – principally, the resemblances are down to the fact that the central character is a former police inspector who now earns his crust as a private investigator. Jackson Brodie is struggling to deal with the sultry heat of a Cambridge summer and his own unsatisfactory life, with a dead marriage not the least of his problems. Thoughts of mortality haunt him, and the one feeling that gives meaning to his life is his belief that he can do some good for the people he deals with in his professional role. As a brilliantly drawn cast of characters intersect with the troubled protagonist, all the insight, humour and sympathy that marked Atkinson’s earlier work is brought into play. The plotting here is deliberately discursive – Atkinson has other fish to fry than the standard concerns of the private eye novel. This is by no means her best book, but it’s still a truly unusual and intriguing novel.
When creative writing courses focusing on crime fiction deal with locale, the approach suggested to students is usually along these lines: don’t forget to establish a sense of place – but do it economically. Four or five pages of description of setting à la Thomas Hardy? Forget it. The orthodoxy in the twenty-first century has been to stress the primacy of arm-twisting narrative – but writers such as ELLY GRIFFITHS are having no truck with that. If Griffiths wants to spend her time placing us in a gloomily realised, almost tactile Norfolk, she won’t be hurried – and her books are all the better for that. Not that she neglects the demands of satisfying plotting: while luxuriating in the texture of her books, the reader is always kept on tenterhooks as her plump, comfortable forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway begins her customary examination of old bones and modern murder. Dying Fall sports a setting that is atypical for the series, but demonstrates that Galloway isn’t always stuck in Norfolk. In the novel, Ruth is shocked to learn by phone that a college friend of hers, Dan Golding, has died in a fire in his Lancashire home. And when, two days later, she receives a letter from the dead man, she is distressed to read a frantic plea for help along with information about a discovery that will alter the field of archaeology irrevocably. And, as in earlier books, Galloway’s relationship with DCI Harry Nelson proves fruitful as she begins her investigation. In the north on holiday, Nelson learns of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of the archaeologist – notably the fact that a neo-Nazi organisation at Golding’s university has been making threats. Before too long, both Ruth and Nelson are in the kind of danger zone that Griffiths so cannily channelled in such books as The Crossing Places and The Janus Stone.
While even the most skilful of crime writers makes the occasional misstep, Griffiths has managed to sustain a remarkably high standard across her Ruth Galloway series, although the pawky mixture of ancient relics, Anglo-Saxon culture, a nostalgia for the trappings of Catholicism and bloodshed for the most contemporary of reasons may need some mixing up occasionally if it is not to slip into formula. But, as yet, there is no danger of that, and the pleasing mix of quirky characterisation (notably of the unheroic but tenacious Ruth) and the malign currents from the past that seep into modern life still delivers a considerable charge. The elements that Griffiths continues to draw on from her childhood walks along the Norfolk coast have plenty of mileage yet.
In thrillers such as JAMES HUMPHREYS’ Riptide, the careful conjuring of atmosphere is absolutely crucial. Set in a secluded village, the various sights and sounds (misty beaches, sparsely populated streets, unfriendly taverns) are essential in locating the concealed deeds of mayhem and murder. Humphreys handles this aspect with the assurance of a master, but his real skill lies in the flinty-edged characterisation of his dramatis personae – not least his heroine, Sergeant Sarah Delaney. Against her will, Delaney is dispatched to the little-frequented village of Caxton on the Norfolk coast to look into a nasty incident. Two corpses have been sighted on the beach, but before she can investigate properly, the bodies have been claimed by the sea. And as Sarah slowly unearths the dark and dangerous secrets behind the deaths, she’s also forced to confront troubling problems from her own past in the village: Caxton is the place where a man she loved once lived, before his sudden death. Sleeping Partner was an auspicious and impressive debut for James Humphreys, and Riptide displays the same casual assurance as the earlier book, notably in the area of its nimble plotting. The trick in novels such as this is to pay out just as many revelations as are necessary to keep the reader thirsting for more – and that’s just what Humphreys does here. It’s a real pleasure to be wrong-footed by the author as often as we are in this accomplished piece.
MIKE RIPLEY’s brand of sardonic crime writing is genuinely unique: translating the American hard-boiled genre into a very English locale has caused many a writer to come adrift, but Ripley is fully in command of his quirky idiom, and his work is utterly different from that of other writers. Characteristic one-liners are prolific in Angel Underground, one of his best books. And Ripley’s wry hero Angel has his hands full in a pleasingly crowded narrative. At the request of his eccentric mother, and against all his finer instincts, Angel is persuaded to join a shambolic archaeological dig in rural Suffolk, privately financed by the even more eccentric Arthur Ransome Swallow, a local landowner who is obsessed with finding the royal mint of Queen Boudica. Typically hard-headed, Angel is sceptical about finding any buried treasure, but he finds menace aplenty. Not only is there something fundamentally wrong with the way the dig is being conducted but everyone connected with it is being threatened or injured, including the detective, and it transpires that there is much more at stake than ancient history. Most worrying of all, Angel’s partner Amy insists on joining the dig to keep an eye on him – but it appears that someone sinister is keeping an eye on her. The site descends into chaos. Ripley fans will need no recommendation here; newcomers will find this a very satisfying place to start. But – be warned – The Talented Mr Ripley is addictive.
Lancashire-born creative writing tutor BENJAMIN WOOD received an immense amount of attention for his first book, 2012’s The Bellwether Revivals. But was it worthy of the hype it received? The novel begins with the discovery of bodies, one of which is on the manicured lawns near the river in Cambridge. Eden Bellwether is still breathing; he has (we are to learn) cast a hypnotic spell on a promising young working-class student, Oscar. The latter is in love with Eden’s equally gilded, aristocratic sister, the beautiful Iris. Eden is a charismatic, eccentric figure who believes himself to be a healer, with the power of music the conduit for his skills. And while Oscar is mesmerised by the seductive Iris, the most crucial relationship he has is with her fascinating brother. If the basic premise here sounds familiar, that’s because the ‘appeal of beauty’ that is built into the novel has as its lodestone Brideshead Revisited (not just Waugh’s novel, but the celebrated television adaptation – we are reminded as much of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as reader-surrogate Charles in thrall to the upper-crust Sebastian). The Bellwether Revivals is, in fact, a cogent and timely examination of the conflict between religion and scepticism, a theme explored with more rigour than in the novel’s template; we rarely doubt that Waugh is on the side of grace and the supernatural. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is also in the DNA here, and there are echoes of another literary analysis of the unhealthy emotional bond between a brother and sister, LP Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda. Does it matter that Benjamin Wood wears his influences so clearly on his sleeve? Some may find that the book reads like a contemporary filigree on its illustrious predecessors, but most readers will be as transfixed by this richly drawn cast of characters as Oscar is by his blue-blooded companions. The fact that Benjamin Wood can hold his own in such heavyweight company is a measure of his achievement.
NICCI GERRARD, the female half of the team who write as Nicci French, has long been a writer of immense skill in her own right, as her solus novels prove. Missing Persons describes an English family living in East Anglia. Primary school teacher Isabel is married to the academic Felix, who works at a university nearby. They have three children, only one of them unproblematic: Johnny, who is beginning his university degree course in Sheffield. But then suddenly (and without warning) Johnny appears to cut off all communication with his family. He has disappeared. The following seven years are the substance of this utterly involving novel.
JIM KELLY’s chosen career was journalism, until he turned to full-time crime writing in 2003 after his first book, The Water Clock, was nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Award. All the popular and atmospheric Dryden books are set in ‘The Black Fen’, that area of misty marsh and isolated communities first used as a crime landscape by Dorothy L Sayers in her 1930s classic The Nine Tailors. The Water Clock introduced a trio of characters who have appeared throughout the series so far. Philip Dryden is the amateur sleuth who is reluctantly drawn into a series of mysteries as he goes about his trade as a journalist on The Crow, the newspaper Kelly has created for the tiny cathedral city of Ely. The author spent ten years in provincial journalism in Bedford and York before moving to Fleet Street and draws heavily on his experiences to produce a flavour of the inherently bizarre and lonely life of the local newspaper ‘hack’. Dryden’s sidekick is Humphrey H Holt, an overweight cab driver who fills his empty life by trundling around the Fens in a two-door Ford Capri looking for business. Humph, divorced, morose and taciturn, combats loneliness with incessant motion and finds in Dryden someone equally happy to avoid personal tragedy by immersing themselves in the lives of others. Dryden’s promising career as a national journalist has been interrupted by a horrific car accident which has left his wife Laura in a coma: Laura is the silent partner in the central trio. She is a prisoner of ‘locked-in syndrome’ and is a patient at a private hospital in Ely, and Dryden’s wanderings always end with a visit to her bedside, where he tells her of his day in the hope that somewhere, on some level, she is listening. (As the books progress, Laura emerges painfully from her coma and is able to participate more fully in her husband’s investigations.)
The books in the series each have a distinct character, often determined by elemental forces. The Water Clock, in which a series of crimes are set in motion by the discovery of a rotting corpse on the roof of Ely cathedral, is told against the backdrop of Fen floods. The Fire Baby, the second in the series, takes place during a sweltering summer heatwave. All the books deal to some extent with crimes in the past as well as the present, and in the latter book, Dryden has to go back to the infamous drought of 1976 to find the clues he needs.
In ALISON BRUCE’s The Calling, a seductive young blonde woman is found gagged and trussed up, the victim of a sinister figure with a dark obsession. An anonymous caller contacts the police, informing them that she is not the first victim in a new wave of crimes – and that she will by no means be the last. DC Gary Goodhew quickly becomes aware that this caller may be the key to unlocking the mysteries; she is a neurotic, self-harming woman, and the youthful Goodhew is well aware that she will need careful handling if she is to help in tracking down a dangerous criminal. Bruce has already demonstrated her credentials in the field of crime with two striking non-fiction titles, Cambridgeshire Murders and Billington: Victorian Executioner. Her research has paid off, although this is a very modern piece of work with both a strong police protagonist and a dangerous, disturbing criminal.
EG RODFORD, influenced by Hammett and Chandler, writes noirish fiction set in contemporary Cambridge. Rodford’s work features private investigator George Kocharyan, whose investigations take him beyond the Cambridge of spires, dons and punts beloved by tourists to the sordid underbelly, a world where town and gown coexist in mutual distrust. In Kocharyan’s first outing, The Bursar’s Wife, he gets drawn into the secrets of the university’s elite as they struggle to maintain the cracking façade of their successful lives. Although dealing with dark subject matter, the book is written with a wry humour.
Wales and the Borders
The late crime writer David Williams (no relation to the Williams discussed below) initially found publishers highly resistant to the novels he set in his native country. He was told: ‘Nobody commits crime in Wales!’ While that may be a typically metropolitan attitude to somewhere far from London, it’s true that the particular character of Wales fights against its use as a backdrop in the blood-boltered fashion of Edinburgh, the North of England and other more persuasively criminous settings. But there are two talented Welsh writers who tackle their Celtic locales head on – and although they do so in very different fashions, both bristle with sardonic humour. MALCOLM PRYCE delivers a hilariously surrealistic take on a Chandleresque private eye in a land of Druids and whelk stalls in novels such as Last Tango in Aberystwyth. This mines the same vein of black humour as its much-acclaimed predecessor, Aberystwyth Mon Amour – Pryce’s invoking of art film directors in his titles (Resnais, Bertolucci) only adds to the number of bizarre juxtapositions that are his stock in trade. In this book, we meet again the wisecracking Louie Knight, whose trench-coated manner on the mean streets of Wales makes for a very funny book that also functions as an ingenious mystery. In Last Tango, we encounter another cast of off-the-wall characters (does Wales really have this many eccentrics?) as Louie becomes involved in Aberystwyth’s ‘What the Butler Saw’ film industry. Academic Dean Morgan checks into a hotel and is mistaken for a sinister Druid killer – and his life takes an even more unfortunate turn when he falls for porn star Judy Juice. It’s up to Louie, the town’s only private eye, to uncover a highly unlikely cocktail of corruption and concupiscence. It’s inevitable that this second book lacks the freshness of its predecessor, but all the off-kilter imagination that made Aberystwyth Mon Amour such fun is firing on all cylinders again here – and Pryce continued to maintain his surreal vision of Wales (and his film references) in further books in the series.
The second author referred to above is JOHN WILLIAMS, who goes for a synthesis of thriller and literary fiction, teeming with dangerous Cardiff lowlifes and some surprisingly complex riffs on notions of identity. The two earlier books in his Cardiff trilogy (Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub and Cardiff Dead) perhaps unearthed a seam of dark humour more aggressively than The Prince of Wales, but this is still a pungent trawl through a Cardiff underworld that most of us would do well to stay away from. Bobby Ranger is that rarity, a female pimp – and she’s become keen to track down the father who abandoned her. At the same time, local hack Pete Duke is looking to dish the dirt on shady entrepreneur Leslie St Clair. All three characters are to have their lives changed irrevocably – and the venue for this event is an ex-cinema (now a theme pub), the eponymous Prince of Wales. It’s no wonder that tough American writers line up to shower praise on Williams: his prose has the same no-mercy take on life at the extremes. But it’s unlikely that Williams will end up on the Welsh Tourist Board’s recommended reading list.
HARRY BINGHAM is a writer of real command. A typically well-turned narrative is Talking to the Dead, the book that introduced his series character DC Fiona Griffiths. In Cardiff, a woman and her young daughter are brutally murdered in a run-down flat. The officer investigating the killings is Griffiths, a woman who is comfortable dealing with death. She tries to put herself in the mindset of the victims and their killer, but her journey takes her to the darker recesses of her own past. The detective with a troubled past is a massively over-familiar motif in crime fiction, but it’s to Harry Bingham’s credit that he is able to re-energise the scenario here so that it seems as fresh as paint. The book gleaned a slew of admirers, no doubt because of the writing that lifts Talking to the Dead effortlessly out of the police procedural realms.
The Welsh Borders are a minatory place in the crime writing of PHIL RICKMAN, whose Midwinter of the Spirit was adapted in 2015 for television. The Lamp of the Wicked is the longest and darkest of the ongoing series of novels about Merrily Watkins, deliverance consultant – or diocesan exorcist – for Hereford, and it takes her into the residual fog still surrounding arguably the most sickening British murders of the twentieth century. Although most of them were committed in their now-demolished house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the killings of Fred and Rose West still cast their shadow over parts of Herefordshire, the county where West was born and grew up. Experts close to the case still believe that many of his victims have never been found. In this novel, DI Francis Bliss of Hereford CID is building a case against a man who seems to see himself as Fred West’s successor. Merrily Watkins has already met this man. Now in police custody, he wants to talk to her. Rickman has noted that he approached this book with trepidation. The aim, he said, was to deal not so much with the graphic horror but with the emotional damage inflicted on whole families by a case that – mainly because of West’s suicide while awaiting trial – has still never been fully investigated. Rickman says it was surprising how many people believed there were many more undiscovered victims… and possibly more people complicit in the murders.
With the success of the award-winning The American Boy (and subsequent Crime Writers’ Association Dagger wins), ANDREW TAYLOR consolidated his following as an extremely distinguished writer of crime fiction. His prose is always elegantly turned and absolutely apposite in terms of the narrative he is addressing. In (for instance) Naked to the Hangman, the reader is taken to the last months of the Mandate in Palestine, and young police officer Richard Thornhill encounters sights that are emblazoned on his consciousness – and which, he fears, he will never shake. He is haunted by a thought that threatens his sanity – is he a killer? After the passage of years, a retired police officer is found dead in what is left of Lydmouth Castle, and DI Thornhill finds himself the suspect in a murder case. Taylor has few rivals when it comes to dispatching crime novels as deftly written as this. Also look out for Taylor’s The Roth Trilogy (1997–2000), which triumphantly shows that crime fiction can deal with serious themes and use innovative literary techniques. In theology, the Four Last Things are Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell, and Taylor cannily utilises this as the perfect foundation for a plot. Each book in the trilogy is self-contained and also works as part of the whole; this is not just a matter of an integrated storyline involving recurring characters and themes – each book modifies the other two, making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Each of the novels uses the conventions of a different type of crime fiction – the first (The Four Last Things) is a psychological thriller, the second (The Judgement of Strangers) toys with the format of the cosy school of whodunits, and the third (The Office of the Dead) is about a woman in peril, though the perils are not of the conventional kind.
There are armies of fictional coppers vying for our attention, but with A Fine and Private Place, FREDA DAVIES made a plausible bid for her protagonist, DI Keith Tyrell, to take his place in the ranks. Bound in Shallows demonstrated that the earlier book was no one-off: this was another well-turned thriller, delivered with understated power. The body of a girl is found on the banks of the Severn after recent flooding, and Tyrell finds himself tracking a killer whose trail leads to the Forest of Dean. Soon the bodies are stacking up, and Tyrell begins to suspect that followers of the occult arts are somehow mixed up in the murders – which now appear to be the work of two killers. But Tyrell (like so many policemen in the world of crime fiction) has an unsympathetic superior officer balking him at every turn. He is taken off the case, but is soon ignoring such niceties. The unassuming manner of Davies’ writing cleverly wrong-foots the reader, and ensures attention.
Other writers and key books
RHYS BOWEN: Evan and Elle, Evan Only Knows
CHRIS COLLETT: Blood and Stone
JM GREGSON: An Academic Death, Murder at the Nineteenth
KATE HAMER: The Girl in the Red Coat
ROBERT LEWIS: Swansea Terminal, Bank of the Black Sheep
STEPHEN LLOYD JONES: The String Diaries, Written in the Blood
HOWARD MARKS: Sympathy for the Devil, The Score
ALISON TAYLOR: In Guilty Night, Child’s Play