James Lee Burke, “Sunset Limited” (1998)

This is like the funhouse mirror of the last one, the Rankin book. Both feature protagonists firmly established in a series (this is book 10 of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels). Both have numerous plot lines, a replete full supporting cast, tricksy changes of perspective, and intricate connections drawing all this together. Both are anchored by a credible, specific sense of locale: here, more or less, the coast regions of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Why funhouse? Simply because, were Rankin manages this all superbly, Burke doesn’t. Frankly, I was confused a lot of the time. In the first 24 pages, we’re introduced to 16 named characters plus a couple of unnamed incidentals. This isn’t the end of the naming, and I could barely keep track. Who’s this again? Have we met them already? They’re doing what now, and that’s because of why? No idea.

I couldn’t summarise the plot for you. I just about held on as it was going, but now that it’s over, I don’t know. There’s a historical case, well actually two I think, and like three or maybe four present day cases or at least things going on, and they kind of hang together, somehow? Somehow.

The changes of perspective and tense and point of view don’t help: from historical to present, from first person to third, etc. There’s no solid ground to stand on and see what’s going on.

Added to which, for all that the sense of place is effective, the slang and vernacular is just too prolific and recondite. If you’re going to use so much of it, you need to provide subtle contextual information to allow the unfamiliar reader to pick up the meanings. Again, not enough to grab hold of.

Final critical point, not of confusion, just of profusion: this is a very violent book. Not gorily, rather casually: so many people die, so many people are smacked about, so many people go straight to fist or gun as first resort. Now, maybe there’s a point to this, maybe the point is that this is the way of life in the dark South of the USA, but honestly, it all gets rather wearing, and you also start to wonder how the main guy and his pals have managed to survive nine books already given their propensity for getting up people’s noses.

It could be that the book makes a lot more sense if you’ve read the previous nine, and so have an antecedent grasp on at least the recurring characters. But I can’t say I’m minded to do my homework and have another go at this one.

Ian Rankin, “Black and Blue” (1997)

A novel in Rankin’s John Rebus series. I’ve read more or less all of them, many of them twice. This is prime mid series stuff. Early in the series, Rebus is something of a cardboard cutout of a detective, a set of tics rather than a character, working through well-wrought but straightforward crime novel structures. Later, there’s almost too much character, both that of Rebus and that of the detailed network of ancillaries and associates, with the detecting and the plot at times incidental. But here, in the middle, we have the sweet spot: a fully realised protagonist, a substantial supporting cast, and a complicated but cogent plot.

It’s this last thing that makes the book remarkable. There are four cases, four plot lines, here. Rebus is involved in and investigating them all. This should be too much, for the detective and for the reader. But Rankin manages to keep it all spinning, the cases making contact with each other, enough given that the attentive reader can keep track without getting lost in a welter of names and leads and plot points. It really is an heck of an achievement to make a structure this complicated legible to the reader.

One particularly nice point about this is the combination of howdunnit and whodunnit, crudely speaking. One of the cases concerns a mostly retired serial killer: we’re given his identity early, and plenty of material from his perspective, and the question is whether and how Rebus will catch up with him. Another concerns a killer in the present, a copycat of the first: we don’t know who, and the question is whether Rebus will find out. One kind of plot is enough for most novels; combining the two is audacious and effective.

The book’s other chief virtue is its sense of place. Almost all the Rebus novels are primarily set in Edinburgh, and they’re justly famous for evoking the city, and for tracing its development over decades. This one also has Edinburgh at its centre, but ranges widely across Scotland: Glasgow, Aberdeen, Fife, off-shore rigs, the Shetlands. It feels like a miniature portrait of the country at a time of flux. There’s also a clever interweaving of fact and fiction. The historical serial killer was real, and other real cases are mentioned: the factual grounding of the fictive makes the sense of place more concrete.

It’s a really great book, this one, and I think enjoyable even without familiarity with the rest of series. Though you could do worse than read the whole lot of them.

Ben Elton, “Popcorn” (1996)

This is pretty bad. It’s supposed to be a satirical thriller of sorts. We have a film director, Bruce, who makes glossy amoral flicks in which a lot of people are glamorously killed. These films provoke a lot of moral outrage and anxiety about copycat crimes. He wins an Oscar for one of them. On the same night, he and his estranged family are taken hostage by two serial killers who claim inspiration from his films and want him to absolve them, live on TV, on that basis.

So far, so mid-90s: all this stuff was certainly in the air, and Elton clearly wants to take the piss out of it. But what, or who, exactly, does he want to take the piss out of? All the characters are types built for mockery: the vain director, the venal ex-wife, the shallow TV hosts, etc. Most of the scenes and situations are constructed so Elton can be rude about something in addition to the people: American TV programmes, awards ceremonies, Hollywood interiors, etc. Fair enough, mock the lot, but it does help for a satire to have an actual target, and it’s really not clear what it is here. American media? American films? American culture in general? I just don’t know.

It also helps if a satire is funny, and fatally, this isn’t. We get a lot of cheap, predictable shots: at the end of the novel, everyone sues each other, because, hey, America, they sue each other there. We get a lot of sneering and smirking. It’s all so tiresome.

I keep calling this a satire, rather than a comedy. That’s partly because the jacket copy call it a satire, and partly because it does seem that Elton wants to offer something like a critique of his targets, not just a send-up. You can tell this because a lot of characters are given to making windy speeches about moral responsibility, artistic freedom, and so on. This is all very well, but since Elton makes them all idiots, it’s far from clear what the critique or message is meant to be. The thought dawns after a while that Elton has no idea. He’s adopting a smug stance that suggests he does know what all these people ought to be saying, how one can square away the competing demands, but he doesn’t. It’s a totally insincere performance, raising shallow questions in the hope of seeming profound, refusing to answer them in the hope of seeming wise.

OK, so the book fails on the satirical bit. Does it at least work as a thriller? Nope. The main problem is that Elton adopts a needlessly tortuous structure, involving flashbacks, flashforwards, occasional gimmicky cuts to descriptions of film scenes, different points of view, etc. For one thing, this means that we know more or less what’s going to happen at the end of the book more or less from the beginning. How will the hostage situation end? No tension there. For another thing, it means that Elton ends up repeating the same stuff two or more times, in flashback, in the present, from different perspectives. This happens so often it must be deliberate, but it’s very tedious and kills the book’s momentum. As does Elton’s habit of occasionally switching from normal prose to a screenplay-style format at moments of drama, which slows the reading right down and drains the drama right out.

The book is also badly, lazily written at the level of word and sentence. There’s a marked inconsistency of vernacular. The book is set in the USA, and adopts a good deal of ersatz American terminology (“babes”, “sodas”), but then mixes this us with incorrigibly British words. There’s an irritating reliance on the word “indeed” to signal ironic distance from proceedings. There’s evidence that Elton either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what “lying prone” actually means. And so on and so on. I could pull dozens of examples, but I don’t have the will and nor do you.

I will mention one last thing, though: the tits. God, this novel is full of boobies, being ogled, admired and felt by the cast of slimy men. Now, naturally, all this shameful behaviour is attributed to the characters rather than the author, but there’s so much tittiness that it’s impossible not to think Elton is in close attendance, rubbing his thighs and panting slightly. Which is of course just what the critics say about the violence in Bruce’s films: it might be just a story, but you wrote it. The one true irony of the book, and the only one that Elton didn’t mean.

Val McDermid, “The Mermaids Singing” (1995)

A nasty serial killer stalks a northern English city. The police bring in a criminal psychologist, Tony Hill, to help them find the baddie by providing a psychological profile. Some of the coppers are unconvinced that fancy academics can be of any use with proper police work. Will Hill manage to vindicate his methods, or will old fashioned policing do the job, or will the killer evade them all?

This is all quite nicely set up, with the clash of old and new policing styles framing a tense investigation, with the usual wrong turns, red herrings, grunt work and flashes of inspiration. The array of characters are familiar but not too stock: the pushy local journalist, the compromised police source, the instinct-first inspector, the ambitious young copper, the handy computer guy, etc. The tension does ratchet up, the plot beats are propulsive without being too contrived, the central protagonists are believably human. The psychology stuff is arguably a little too mumbo-jumbo, as Hill gets inside the mind of the killer through a sort of empathic role-play, but there’s not so much of it that it becomes tiresome. And McDermid has a real talent for making things very nasty without straying into torture porn.

However, there’s one really odd feature of the plotting that mars the whole book. There might be spoilers here. See, by this stage of the development of the crime novel, we all kind of know the rules. We’re not in the golden age of puzzlers, where clues are scattered along the way and the detective brings them together in a denouement. But we are expecting that, somehow, what happens at the end of the book will satisfyingly and somewhat surprisingly pull together what happened earlier, often bringing into prominence facts and events that were presented somewhat incidentally when introduced. So as readers, we’re on the lookout for those facts and events. Writers have the challenge of introducing them in a way that allows for surprise, fitting them into the book in a natural-ish way, such that their relevance only later becomes apparent.

Now, throughout this book, Tony is subject to dirty phone calls from a mysterious woman. He has no idea who this woman is, and we’re given to understand that these have been going on since before we met him, and they just sort of started happening. As the investigation unfurls, Tony is often interrupted in his rest by one of these calls, which he tolerates and somewhat enjoys as a therapeutic aid for his erectile problems. But they’re presented as totally unconnected to the matter at hand, and Tony exhibits no wish to think much about who this person is, or why they started ringing him.

Well, gee, huh. Do you think maybe there might actually be a connection? Do you think this woman might actually be –gasp! – the serial killer? And do you think this wouldn’t be so clangingly obvious if the otherwise curious, alert, clever protagonist made, like, some attempt to think through what all this mucky phone stuff was about?

The problem, essentially, is that in straining so keep the the phone calls apparently incidental, McDermid makes it apparent how artificial their place in the book is, and so makes it obvious that they’ll turn out to be very significant. And this in turn undermines a lot of the rest of the book, which is about how acutely Hill brings his smarts to bear on profiling the man who’s knocking off unfortunates. I don’t think this is deliberate undermining, designed to ironically show the limitations of the methods. The methods do, in the end, triumph. I think it’s just a really clumsy bit of plotting that somewhat spoils an otherwise very decent read.

Minette Walters, “The Scold’s Bridle” (1994)

In a small village in southern England, an unpleasant rich woman is murdered. No shortage of suspects: Mathilda Gillespie had a lot of enemies, many of whom were intricately bound to her by blood, lies, or both, and many of whom end up disliking our protagonist almost as much. That protagonist is Sarah Blakeney, a local doctor whose mild kindness to Gillespie is inexplicably rewarded by inheritance of her whole massive estate. Hence the dislike and suspicion: those who think they ought to inherit are rarely well-disposed to those who in fact do.

I’ll come back to the protagonist in a minute, but I just want to dwell a little on the genre. You might call this Dorset Gothic. There’s a lot of murky stuff happening in these quiet villages, especially among the posh, who care so much about social appearances and will do all sorts of terrible things in the name of keeping them up. You can probably guess the sorts of things we’re talking about: incest, child abuse emotional and physical, drug habits, wild teens with dubious beaus, etc etc. As it all piled up, I did wonder if it wasn’t perhaps too much: you don’t have to hit every one of the beats. But there’s undeniably atmosphere, dark and claustrophobic.

Now, I mentioned a protagonist, and ostensibly we do have one: that fortunate doctor. But it’s more complicated than that. It’s never quite clear who’s in de facto charge of driving forward the murder investigation or indeed the plot: Blakeney, or the actual police detective assigned to it, or less often some other characters, variously seem to be doing the work. This lack of clarity is in part because the close third person point of view of the book keeps changing. We look over the shoulders and inside the minds of lots of characters, and the various bits of information that come together to solve the mysteries of the book accumulate gradually in our mind, but not at the same rate in their minds. It’s a really neat device and really nicely done. It’s especially effective when we learn a fact from one character, then switch to the point of view of another, who, ignorant of the fact, confidently thinks or acts speculatively about it and gets things badly wrong. This happens a few times. It’s a smart way of highlighting the hubris of the imperfect characters that one’s drawn.

They are indeed all imperfect, none more so than Blakeney’s tenuously estranged artist husband, who rather unfortunately turns out to be the best of them all: the dashing hero when needed, the best navigator of the moral byways, the smartest deductive cookie. Why unfortunately? Well, because all this is ostensible, on the surface of the authorial intention: but the actual action goes against the grain, and reveals Blakeney as really a bit of a knob. It’s like Walters developed a crush on the character that blinded her to what she was actually writing about him. This adds to the faint sense of social conservatism that lingers around the novel: we can have a feisty female protagonist, but in the end, the husband sorts things out. We can also have slightly tedious ethical discussions around issues like abortion.

All this is minor complaint, though. I enjoyed the book and I wouldn’t mind a little more Dorset Gothic sometime.

Patricia Cornwell, “Cruel and Unusual” (1993)

This is one of Cornwell’s many books in the Kay Scarpetta series—the fourth of 29. Scarpetta is a forensic pathologist in Virginia (and later in the series Florida). In this one, she starts out with a routine examination of the body of an executed murderer, but things spiral quickly: other murders happen, in ways that echo the crimes of the executed guy, and bizarrely a lot of the forensic evidence points to him. But he’s dead. So he can’t have done them. So who did? Unless he’s still alive. Etc.

These early Scarpetta books now read like the blueprints for TV series in the CSI mould. There’s a lot of really detailed and really realistic forensics, body part names and exit wounds and all. The detail is not just in the forensics, and at times it becomes too much. A decent amount of the plot involves messing about with computers, and we arguably don’t really need quite so much explanation of exactly how to navigate Unix operating systems and terminal networks. It’s never quite overwhelming, but it’s dense at times.

Oddly, up against this concrete realism, there’s a fair amount of magic happening, partly in the content and partly in the plotting. So far as content goes, the forensic stuff that Scarpetta does is augmented by what she can call in from her FBI contacts, who use their mystical powers to divine all sorts of things about down jackets and their precise composition and such. There’s a faintly conservative streak detectable here. The FBI are all-powerful and infinitely just. The police and the law generally are entirely for the good, save the odd deviant. It’s an almost touching faith.

As for plotting magic: the core mystery and thrill is knotty, puzzling, and satisfying, if ultimately resolved bathetically. But a lot of the peripherals strain credulity. For one thing, Scarpetta seems to get far more involved in actual police work than a pathologist should. Perhaps things were really that loose in the 1990s. Perhaps not. For another, more incredible thing, the only person who can possibly deal with all the computer stuff is Scarpetta’s teenage niece, who’s summoned from Florida and effectively brought onto the case. Right, so the Feds and similar can find out where exactly a feather came from, but need geeky teen relatives to work out who accessed a terminal and messed around with the files. It’s a pretty transparent way to reintroduce and bed in characters who are intended to stick around for the long haul of a series. Besides the plot strain, this bloats the book somewhat. You might think that it’s better for having some human-relation byplay between niece and aunt; you might think it would be better without it and 100 pages shorter (435 in paperback, mine, though a generous point size).

Overall, the book stands up still where a lot of its contemporary peers don’t any longer: it delivers some tension and some mystery and some satisfying detail without feeling painfully dated. A decent read.

Colin Dexter, “The Way Through the Woods” (1992)

I could pretty much copy and paste the review of the last Morse one here. This one is good and irritating in just the same ways, again with the good outweighing the irritating to a large degree. I suppose this is exactly what you want from a series: reassuring predictability.

The main manifest difference between this one and the last is the setting. Where that was effectively a historical mystery, this one is set in the (then) present, as Morse investigates the disappearance of a Swedish student last seen wandering around near Oxford. The plot unfolds in a way that conveniently allows both protagonist and author the chance to indulge their interests in seamy, seedy things, and prompts the contemporary reader to boggle at the lengths to which people would go in the early 1990s to access pornography. I could perhaps have done with a bit less of all that.

The present-day setting also makes it much more apparent just how contrived the novel is. All novels are contrivances, of course, but there’s no real attempt here to hide it: we are very much being treated to a display of how clever both protagonist and author are, not at all to anything like a realistic police procedural, whatever the nods in that direction. Again, this is both irritating and good; irritating because nobody likes a show-off, good because the puzzle and the contrivance really are quite clever. Perhaps I’ll end up re-reading all the Morses, though perhaps not in a binge.

Minor notes for one’s own clever-clogs satisfaction: (a) both this Morse and the last make passing reference to Uppsala—does this happen in every Morse?; (b) one of the smart-alec epigraphs is wrongly attributed. Nothing more satisfying than correcting a clever-clogs.

Barbara Vine, “King Solomon’s Carpet” (1991)

A lot of how you respond to a book is to do with the expectations you bring to it. Given the author, whose works I often like, I expected this to be good, and moreover good in the ways that are typical of Ruth Rendell and of crime novels. But after about 50 pages, I was starting to wonder, and by the end I was sadly concluding that this is one of the worst in the CWA sequence so far.

The first thing you might expect of a crime novel is a central plot, a narrative focussed on a particular crime, its committal, its consequences, its detection (or, more broadly, a narrative structure generating tension and suspense and thrill). But it’s very hard to say what the plot of this book actually is. It centres around the oddball inhabitants of a sort-of squat (a Vine trope?), and seems to attempt a sort of panoptic insight into their lives and their associations; we follow first one, then another, then a third, as they drift around doing things. Occasionally we divert into following a friend or relative of one of our primary gang. We sometimes go even further from the core: for example, we get a couple of sections of a few pages each focussing on the person who nicked one of the more central character’s handbag, telling us what he did with the money and how he met his deserved sticky end. None of it adds up to anything.

Now admittedly, a few of th0se primary people are more intertwined and more focal than others. The three who come closest to forming a plot are Axel, a terrorist hatching an implausible scheme to bomb the London Underground; Alice, who Axel implausibly seduces as part of his implausible scheme; and Tom, who is implausibly infatuated with Alice and implausibly blind to her seduction. As you may have gathered, this is all very implausibly done, and don’t let me give the impression that this is the narrative engine of the book. There is no narrative engine. The events that do occur are telegraphed well ahead of their happening, just so we don’t get the notion that there’s any attempt being made here to build suspense.

The one thing that comes closest to uniting the various bits of the book is that they’re all connected, more or less, to the London Underground. Some of the cover blurb says that Vine “audaciously makes the Underground the central character”. I suppose if by that you mean “bangs on about it a lot” you’re right. There are many passages in the book reminiscent of that things that happens when you’re in London: you mention where you’re staying, and every Londoner in earshot tries to tell you how you must have got to wherever you are, by which lines, etc. I was going to type one of these passages out to prove it, but the one I picked has 10 mentions of various lines and stations in it, and I just cannot be bothered. You can read it yourself if you want.

It comes to seem like the ambition of the book is something in the vein of Balzac or Zola: a realist portrayal of a section of the populace executed via detailed description of their lives, sustained just by the interest of that description rather than by any real narrative driving it along. Now, that’s a fine enough ambition, but what a novel with those aims is doing in the crime writing awards I don’t know.

Besides, while we might give full marks for ambition, we have to give very few for execution. Rendell utterly fails to deliver her usual acute psychology; as I’ve suggested, nearly all the characters are implausibly motivated, implausibly irrational, and implausibly stupid. The settings, events, and so forth are all equally unconvincing. I’m sadly reminded of that awful Fleming novel: the same sense of someone trying to offer description and implicit comment on something they know nothing about.

To ice this terrible cake, the book is written in weird, stilted prose, like someone trying out English. For example there are lots of constructions of this kind:

“the chocolate bar that is called a Twirl”

“the kind of ice cream that is called a Dracula”

So many it must be deliberate. But to what end? Nobody thinks like this, nobody speaks like this, and it’s an utter mystery to me why anyone would want to write stuff like this. Or, indeed, to read it.

Reginald Hill, “Bones and Silence” (1990)

Funny enough, I’ve watched a fair bit of Dalziel and Pascoe on the telly without ever reading one of the books. I’m not sure I’ll bother with many more. This really suffers in comparison to the Morse just gone, because it seems to try to do much the same thing, but worse on every count.

The central plot is to do with a killing that Dalziel, the big detective, sees across the road from his house. He’s convinced it’s murder; all the evidence points to suicide, or an accident. He’s right, of course. It’s fairly clear from early on that Swain, the man Dalziel has pegged for the murder, is wrong ‘un, and we only wait to find out how wrong, in what ways. Compare the proper puzzle of the Morse just gone.

So not a huge amount of puzzle, although there’s a certain satisfaction in the gradual unravelling of the skein of lies. There is, however, a huge amount of plot. The central plot is orbited by several others that don’t really connect to it, giving the novel the feel of a soap opera. I think this is partly because this is the 10th or 11th novel in the series, and by now the author really likes a lot of his characters, and feels compelled to give them proper things to do. But even then, we really don’t need the completely extraneous subplot concerning suicidal letters sent to Dalziel. This book did not need to be over 400 pages long. Compare the bare 230 pages of the Morse novel just gone.

Those characters, by the way. Perhaps if you’ve read the previous 10, you find Dalziel compellingly drawn and congenial company, but without that background he comes across as two dimensional and really quite unpleasant. His main traits seem to be drinking and being rude. Super! And rather less attractive than Morse.

Finally, the prose is decent enough, but with a bit too much imitation of accent, and a sprinkling of ten-dollar words that had even your erudite reviewer reaching for the dictionary. Where Dexter’s prose is irritating in ways that still bring you into the text, Hill’s is irritating in ways that take you away from it.

I’m perhaps being a bit harsh; the book does clip along nicely, and I wouldn’t rule out reading another one of these if it fell into my hands. But I’d rather read another Morse.

Colin Dexter, “The Wench Is Dead” (1989)

I approached this one with some trepidation. See, I read all the Morse books several times in my early to mid teens. I remember them quite affectionately in general, as clever, intricate works. But I also remember several really, ummm, dated details. Morse making some important inferences from the colour of victim’s knickers. Morse sussing out that the Rastafarian at college dinner was actually a white man in black face, due to his crucial mistake of eating the pork. And so forth. So, two related grounds for trepidation: what if they don’t deserve the affection in general? And what if there’s a lot more of that kind of thing specifically?

The affection turns out to be justified, more or less. The reservations might stand. This novel is kind of the opposite of the Dibdin one just past. Where that was unobtrusively fine, this is both good and irritating in noticeable, showy ways.

Irritating: Morse himself is really quite pervy. He spends most of this one in hospital. Within 35 pages, two different women in the orbit of his ward have been blandly described as “slimly attractive”, and halfway through all the nurses have epithets. Yet somehow, perhaps because he hides his salacious thoughts behind a diffident exterior, all these women end up eating out of the palm of his hand, and one of them at least ends up in his bed (I’ve moved to generics; so far as I remember, this happens in every single Morse book). What’s worse, you don’t get the impression that the author is standing too far behind the character here. After all, who wrote “slimly attractive” twice? There’s a little whiff of wish fulfilment about it all. (interesting question: at what point in this sequence do I stop giving books a partial pass on the basis that those were different times? Tempting to say quite soon, but apparently 1989 really was quite a while ago)

Besides the character, there’s the writing. Now, I’ll come to its good elements in a minute, but my, there are some irritating things about the writing. It’s deliberately, insistently stylish, often in the worst way: packed with literary allusions and alliterations and intrusive authoring (was this once my idea of smart? Oooof). There’s abundant overuse of italics, in a way that seems to belie a little anxiety, either that one’s own sentences don’t direct the emphasis to just the right place on their own, or, instead, that the reader might turn out to be a little slow and thus need a little help in appreciating the sheer quality of the prose. The literary epigraphs prefacing every chapter seal the impression that the author is both very pleased with himself and also trying a little too hard.

Alright, that’s what’s irritating. What’s good? Well, many of the good things are cousins of the bad. For all that Morse is a perv, he’s also a properly drawn character, not just an assembly of traits. For all that the prose is sometimes irritating, it’s also properly stylish, sentences clearly refined, nicely weighted.

Moving to content, the plot is excellently done, executed as a proper puzzle. It’s a very cold case, the murder of a young woman in the 1800s, which Morse pursues from his hospital bed by doing a bunch of reading and getting some of those slimly attractive women to do research for him. This allows Dexter to present subtle clues in the stuff Morse is reading, then alert you that a clue has been presented in the course of Morse’s musings without actually telling you what it is, thus sending you back a couple of pages to work it out. It’s a really neat trick, giving the novel the feel of a crossword (one of Morse’s preoccupations). Morse’s reading also allows Dexter to have fun, and show off, by presenting pastiches of various forms of writing, including stultifying academic prose.

Add a dash of humour that just skirts the right side of inappropriate, and you have a novel that’s fun, whatever its evident flaws. My teenage self was right in this case: this is really well made, clever, enjoyable stuff.

Michael Dibdin, “Ratking” (1988)

This kind of came and went and I don’t know what else to say about it. It starts off plodding, the pace picks up about a third through, and then it trundles along fine and then it’s over.

The setup is this: Aurelio Zen, a washed-up investigator based in Rome, is sent to Perugia to investigate a kidnapping that’s taking a bafflingly long time to resolve, given that the kidnappers and the family have been negotiating about a ransom for ages. Zen starts to suspect that one or some of the victim’s four children, plus or minus other people close to them, are conspiring to sabotage the negotiations. He also suspects that some or all of the local police, magistrates, and general public would also rather he didn’t succeed. He does in the end, of course.

This is all done well enough, and larded with enough Italian cliché to keep the sense of place intact, but somehow it feels like it ought to be better, more lingering. Maybe the characterisation is a bit too dense, maybe the plotting is a bit too obvious while also being too complicated, maybe the clichés are a bit too clichéd. Or maybe, you know, this is all fine. A fairly frictionless, effortless read that slides smoothly away. Not obvious that that should be award-winning material, but it’s an achievement all the same.

Barbara Vine, “A Fatal Inversion” (1987)

Barbara Vine was Ruth Rendell’s pseudonym, under which she published 14 books to go with the 60 odd under the Rendell name. She was never quite clear on why she needed one, and there was probably a mix of pragmatic and artistic reasons, the latter perhaps not totally clear to the artist herself. I’d need to read a lot more to really get a grip on the differences between Vine and Rendell, so I’m not going to bother discussing them, which makes this first paragraph somewhat redundant, but there we go.

Anyway, this novel has two timelines that are unfolded together. In 1976, five young people, three men and two women, spend a long hot summer in a country house that one of them has inherited, treating it as somewhere between an experiment in communal living and a season-long squat party. We know that something bad happens, because 10 years later the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are discovered at the house. The woman is fairly clearly one of the original two. In 1986, we follow the three men as they ruminate on that summer, the bad happening, and their roles in it, and worry about whether they’re going to finally be held to account.

The question of accounting is the main source of tension in the 1980s strand. The main sources in the 1970s strand are the questions of what exactly happened, where the baby came from, and which of the two young women was killed. The tricksy thing here is that the three present-day men know the answers, and we know they know. So to maintain the tension in the 1970s strand, the 1980s strand has to be coy in ways that become slightly strained. Most obviously, the three men can’t be made to refer to the victims by name, even when it would be very natural to do so in speech or thought. There’s a lot of similar talking around the subject and a fair amount of manifest misdirection. It just about works, and it just about pays off, as the climax of the 1970s strand isn’t quite what you expect. Still, one might wonder if the novel could have achieved its ends without bothering to obscure the ending.

I say this because the tension, or mystery, doesn’t seem to be the actual point here. The point seems to be to explore how the three men in the present have been damaged by what they did in the past—they’re all much less than they might have been, and not just in ways that are typical of middle-aged disappointment, but in ways that suggest they’ve already paid their accounts to some degree. I don’t think this is entirely successful; one of them seems to be punished gratuitously, another seems to get off rather lightly. But perhaps there’s an acute observation there about how heavily conscience weighs or doesn’t on certain kinds of mind. We do also get a sight, right at the end, of what became of the other woman, which perhaps is the most mysterious thing for the bulk of the book. It’s an interesting, engaging read, and it does give you something to chew on that’s different from what you get in a rote Rendell.

Ruth Rendell, “Live Flesh” (1986)

This has all the hallmarks of a good Rendell novel. We have a protagonist with a disturbed mind, approached in close third person, allowing us to get inside the wonky thoughts. Victor Jenner has just been released from prison after 10 years for attempted murder. He’s also, and more importantly, a serial stranger-rapist, though has never been tried for that. He is not right in the head; his sense of what the world owes him, and what he owes the world, is fatefully askew. We have the protagonist set in a situation from which no good will come. Victor strikes up an unlikely relationship with his victim, David Fleetwood, and his girlfriend, Claire Conway, and meanwhile exploits the carelessly attended cash lying around his aunt Muriel’s house, and meanwhile tries to resist raping anyone. And so we have the creeping sense of dread as we wait to see exactly how nothing good, and something terrible, will come of this situation.

And yet, somehow, this did not seem very good. It’s illustrative of the problems of writing about essentially mad characters in crime and thriller novels. One of the principal sources of interest in such novels is motive. Exploring why people do bad things allows the author to explore dark byways of human thought and behaviour. But that exploration depends on a sort of baseline assumption of rationality. If the reason your character does bad things is, basically, that they’re mad, the exploration has much less interest, and you seem to be left with two choices: either provide no explanation at all of their behaviour beyond madness, which is shallow and unsatisfying, or provide an explanation of their madness, which has risks I’ll mention shortly.

What Rendell often does well is occupying an uneasy middle ground between those two choices. She provides detailed and forensic descriptions of patterns of disturbed thought, while refraining from offering any explanation or judgement of the disturbance. The description provides enough explanation to satisfy, and also gives an opportunity to demonstrate an authorial gift for precise and believable descriptions of this kind, and also, because the thoughts are disturbed, gives the reader a sort of visceral sense of nastiness akin to the one you feel looking closely at a bad physical injury.

The thing with this novel is, Rendell doesn’t do this well. She strays too far in the direction of trying to provide something like an explanation of why Victor’s mind is disturbed in such a way as to make him a rapist (this, rather than the attempted murder, is his real crime and pathology). But she doesn’t go far. Instead she gives a whole load of hinted, teased, possible explanations, and then sort of shrugs and tells the reader to make of that what they will. There’s some stuff about the relationship between Victor’s parents, and the fact that he saw them shagging while still quite young. Was that it? Maybe. There’s a suggestion that 10 years in jail would send anyone mad. Perhaps? There are gestures towards awkward formative moments in relationships with women. There is, bizarrely, a phobia of tortoises. There are lots and lots of descriptions of dreams (always a bad sign) that are perhaps supposed to reveal something about his subconscious. And so on.

The central problem here is that none of this amounts to a serious attempt at explanation of disturbance. There’s no theoretical cogency, no consistent line, just a messy knot of things that might have the makings of an explanation. That’s far from ideal. But it’s one of the risks of starting down the path of providing explanation of your protagonist’s madness. Either you really go for it, in which case you have to essentially give the reader a psychology textbook, or you hint at explanation and hope it convinces. The former is likely to be dry, and beholden to some particular theory that the reader may dislike: the latter is likely to be unsatisfying in exactly the ways that this book is.

Paula Gosling, “Monkey Puzzle” (1985)

This is dense, complicated, and really quite enjoyable, provided you can overlook a significant degree of homophobia. It’s an academic setting. The deceased, Adamson, is a faculty member in the English department of a fictional Ohio university. In best academic fashion, all his colleagues detest him, for once with good reason: he’s a blackmailer with a hold over nearly all of them. So the detective, Stryker, has a closed list of suspects, none of whom have great alibis, all of whom have some motive. And away we go.

Let’s get the homophobia out of the way first. Adamson is gay, and while it’s never quite implied that he’s a detestable blackmailer because he was gay, there’s all the same a fairly strong suggestion that his sexuality is meant to be another of his detestable features. It’s only ever invoked with squeamishness or disgust or prurience, depending on which character is invoking. I think one can overlook this, but one could also be reasonably quite put off by it.

If one overlooks it, the rest is pretty good, despite some things that are usually also off-putting. The character list is long, there’s an apparently digressive plot involving a janitor, there’s arch allusion to Christie novels and other crime fiction, there’s the added complication that Stryker has history with the English department generally and one faculty member specifically.

But somehow this is all executed and integrated well enough to make the book pleasingly dense, rather than annoyingly so. It also all interacts nicely with the central investigation plot—distraction enough to make it tricky to quite see what’s going on, not enough distraction to be obfuscatory. The circle of suspects does shrink a little too early for the conclusion to be fully satisfying, but it’s presented in a genuinely tense scene. The writing is generally unobtrusive, which is more of a compliment than it seems. And there’s a lot of the sort of university faculty sniping and gossiping and such that anyone who works at a university will wish they didn’t recognise and will also enjoy recognising. Gosling goes on the list of authors from this series whose other works I’ll actively look out.

B.M. Gill, “The Twelfth Juror” (1984)

A TV personality, Edward Carne, is on trial for murder. Richard Quinn is one of the jurors. Through improbable coincidence, he is also secretly harbouring Carne’s missing alcoholic daughter, who may be a key witness. The book works its way through Carne’s trial and Quinn’s tsuris as he tries to reconcile his public duty and his private loyalty.

There’s plenty here that is good, and should work. Carne and Quinn are fairly well drawn characters, some of the courtroom drama is very good, and there’s a nice balancing act throughout as the evidence unfolds: we really can’t be sure whether or not Carne is guilty.

All the same, this felt like a bit of a plod, even though it’s just 175 pages. Several minor reasons, I think.

First, while we can’t be sure on the evidence presented whether or not Carne is guilty, the logic of the structure dictates that he almost certainly can’t be, since otherwise there would be no reveal or twist at the end, and we know there must be. So the balancing act is unbalanced.

Second, writing about a jury might tempt an author to draw twelve characters. This is too many characters; the temptation should be resisted, especially if witnesses and family members will also be drawn. The temptation is not here resisted, and so we keep digressing into this juror’s worries about his reptiles, or that juror’s scheme to seduce the boyfriend of the other juror.

Third, the writing itself is pedestrian, and occasionally worse: clunky or distractingly imprecise. For instance, we’re told that a barrister paused his closing argument and “looked thoughtfully at the jury for a couple of minutes before continuing”. No he didn’t! Two minutes of silence in a speech is an absolutely excruciating interval. The judge would be intervening to ask if he’d had a stroke. And anyway, you don’t need to name the duration to convey the idea of a telling pause. Try: “he looked thoughtfully at the jury before continuing”. Much better. Strange to say of an already short-ish book, but a sharp edit would have wrought improvements.

Fourth, as intimated above, there’s a strong sense of improbability about the Quinn-driven plot strand. It’s partly the fact that he somehow ends up with Carne’s daughter under his wing, and partly the fact (which he keeps pointing out) that the manifestly obvious thing to do in his situation is to immediately tell the court he’s compromised and get off jury duty before the trial even starts. And he keeps pointing it out! Just do it, mate.

Usually when I’m not mad keen on a book in this series, I can see how the very same book, the same essential plot or structure or character, could be done better but basically preserved. With this one, I can’t. There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but it’s not quite right, and any of the obvious ways to try to improve it would destroy it. Best to just leave it alone.

John Hutton, “Accidental Crimes” (1983)

In a typical outing for the Viz character Victorian Dad, the eponymous character spends three-quarters of the strip imposing ridiculous old-fashioned strictures on his modern family, then becomes overly excited by a table leg and wanks himself into a coma.

The protagonist of Accidental Crimes, Conrad Nield, is a tutor at a teacher training college. He has old-fashioned educational and social ideas. On a work trip, something repressed erupts; he makes gross passes at women, goes to see a pornographic film, picks up a hitchhiker at whom he makes another gross pass, and then dumps her in the middle of nowhere. Because there’s a serial killer of hitchhikers around, he comes to the attention of the police. He lies to them, his lies are uncovered, things spiral, and by the end of the book he’s lost his job, his wife, and his dignity.

It’s just as crude as Victorian Dad, but not as funny. Nield is an eminently contemptible character. He’s cowardly, weak-willed, self-absorbed, priggish, cruel to his students, awful to his wife, terrible in bed; above all, a dreadful anachronism in his social and educational environment. We’re given ample evidence of all these flaws, and it’s clear early on that he’s going to pay a price for them. We’re just waiting to see what it is: wrongful conviction for multiple murders, or merely multiple humiliations. The murders themselves are grim and incidental. The police solve the case, almost accidentally, but the focus is entirely on what that means for Nield.

It’s unclear how the reader is meant to feel about all this. Nield is not in the least sympathetic, but he’s so obviously set up for his fall, and the fall is so heavy, that satisfaction or schadenfreude seem just as inappropriate as compassion. Relief, perhaps, that he’s just humiliated, not actually sent to prison? But that would require at least some degree of sympathy. One wonders why an author would write a book so tightly focussed on someone they evidently dislike entirely; someone who is, really, made exactly to be disliked, a construction of contemptible characteristics. Obviously, writers of crime fiction often write about unpleasant characters, but there’s a difference between (for example) Rendell’s forensic, dispassionate description of her psychopaths and Hutton’s dripping disdain for his creation.

I suspect the answers lie in authorial biography. For nearly 20 years, Hutton was himself a lecturer at a teacher training college, one which underwent various mergers and institutional upheavals during his time there. The office-political manoeuvrings that accompany such upheavals figure large in the plot of the book. It’s also replete with illustrations of how one should or shouldn’t treat trainee teachers under one’s tutelage. Given all this, it’s hard to escape the impression that Nield’s character is derived directly from that of a colleague, or perhaps colleagues, that Hutton really did not like. Furthermore, Hutton only published two novels; this was his second; it came out two years before he retired. With that in mind, one can see Accidental Crimes as a kind of revenge fantasy, an end-of-career reckoning with Hutton’s work enemies. The biography is sketchy, so this can only be speculation. Perhaps Hutton was himself the old-fashioned teacher, the social Victorian: perhaps this is an exacting self-portrait. But if the late-age revenge theory is right, his targets will surely have read this award-winning novel, and will surely have recognised themselves. Just imagine the atmosphere at the retirement party.

Peter Lovesey, “The False Inspector Dew” (1982)

For the first 100 pages or so, I thought I was going to really dislike this. In those 100 pages we’re introduced to an apparently excessive number of characters, all dislikable, while being subjected to a little too much 1920s period detail. It’s clear that contrivance is afoot, that all these characters will end up entwined in some way. It’s not clear that such obvious contrivance, with such unpleasant people, is going to be at all enjoyable.

But you know what, it turns out that the next 250 pages are well worth the slight slog of the first 100. All the characters end up on a liner crossing the Atlantic, and farce ensues. Murderous farce, of course, but farce all the same, and increasingly comic. Through a string of coincidences and poorly chosen pseudonyms, dentist Walter Baranov ends up being mistaken for a famous police inspector (Dew of Crippen case fame) and tasked with investigating a murder on board, which may or may not be a murder he himself has committed, in consort with his beloved Alma, who is masquerading as his estranged wife and possible murder victim Lydia.

It’s all pretty silly, but is clearly meant to be, and once things get going, it’s a page-turning pleasure. Baranov approaches the case, consciously or not, by presenting such a bumbling front that people feel intimidated into telling him everything, for fear that the great (false) investigator Dew is three steps ahead of them already, operating on a higher plane. Meanwhile the other characters slip in and out of disguises, each other’s rooms, and so on, in the best farcical style. You’re so taken up with the comedy that you’re distracted from the underlying progression of the case, which is in fact very cleverly constructed and subtly revealed, and so the smart plot twists emerge organically and surprisingly. And since it’s a farce, it really doesn’t matter that most of the characters are unpleasant or flawed: that’s what they’re supposed to be.

I could well imagine someone hating the whole thing, if they didn’t have taste for situational comedy and such mixed with murder mystery, and I do think this sort of genre mashup is often done poorly (q.v., perhaps, that Keating book two years ago), but for me the payoff here was well worth getting through the slightly laboured setup.

Martin Cruz Smith, “Gorky Park” (1981)

You know sometimes, you’re reading a book and you’re thinking, this ought to be good but somehow isn’t? That was my experience all through Gorky Park.

The book is set mostly in Moscow, where police investigator Arkady Renko is trying to work out who the three faceless bodies are, who killed them, why, and whether the KGB’s interest in the case is in his favour or not. As he pursues the case, Renko traipses around Moscow and its surroundings and encounters all manner of Russians, from high-ranking bureaucrats to Siberian runaways to honest factory men. He also copes with the dissolution of his marriage and hopes for the resolution of his love (I would say infatuation) for a young woman tangentially involved in his case.

There should be a lot to like here. The portrait of lives in Soviet Russia is rich in detail, dripping in verisimilitude. The murders at the centre of the plot seem to present a proper mystery. The thematic clash of agencies promises to enhance both. We get an authentic grasp of how the Soviet machinery works, and a doubling of the mystery: who did it and why might the KGB care? And all this is written up in well-wrought prose.

And, yet, while feeling like I was enjoying each page as I read it, I found that I couldn’t do more than 30 pages or so in a sitting. It was like trying to each huge portions of rich food. Here’s the thing, I think: Smith worked on the book for the best part of a decade, and based the Russian elements of it on a two-week trip and a whole bunch of interviews and library work. What emerges is over-stuffed and over-researched and over-written. Not any of these in a clanging bad way: the book is overall enjoyable, and you can see why it sold loads of copies. But still, it’s overdone in all those ways.

The usual, bad way in which a book manifests over-research is through the steady thud of facts about a subject being deposited in the reader’s mind. There’s a tiny bit of that here, but the problem is more like this: Smith has learnt so much about the various milieus of Soviet society that he can’t bear to miss his chance to (say) portray a homosexual relationship encouraged by and flourishing in the particular circumstances of the Soviet penal system. And so somehow the book includes all the characters and places and situations about which he’s learned. It’s all well-written and convincingly imagined and at some level impressive, but there’s just a bit too much of it, excessively digressive, there for its own sake rather than for its contribution to plot or structure. This is thrown into relief when Americans are the focal characters and when the action switches to New York; Smith can allow himself to write this without having to show everything he knows about it, because he didn’t have to learn it the same way.

Similarly, a bad over-written book is full of prose that’s been thought about too much, metaphors hammered to death, that kind of thing. Here, well, it’s the same sense of things being pushed too far, but more subtle things. Renko is almost too rich a character; he has psychological depth and nuance of implausible degree (nobody knows himself as well as Renko apparently does). Meanwhile, the murder mystery that Renko is involved with is both too mysterious and too obvious: the details are convoluted but the outline is very clear very early. Too much concentration on getting the trees just so, not enough thought about how the wood looks from afar. Finally, in the end, Smith can’t seem to decide whether to concentrate on the (intricate, clever) murder mystery, or the (intricate, clever) inter-agency conflict and intrigue lying behind it, and so does too much of both, and in the end the reader is suffocated by intricacies.

This is, in sum, a good book, but could perhaps have been really great if Smith just chilled out a little. I wonder whether in fact some of the later, less garlanded Renko novels might turn out to be better, if they were perhaps written at greater pace and and a more relaxed mind.

H. R. F. Keating, “The Murder of the Maharaja” (1980)

Where the Francis novel felt somehow contemporary to its time, this is a study in deliberate archaism. The setting is 1930s British India. The plot is a golden-era affair: one murder, a limited list of suspects, a brainy detective, and a litany of clues and red herrings. The prose style is often the sort of lulling repetitiveness that I vaguely think is meant to recall Kipling (vaguely, because I’ve not read much Kipling, at least not recently).

So there’s three archaisms. Why someone would want to write such a novel, I don’t quite know. Affectionate pastiche? Nostalgia? Boredom? Whatever the reasons, we can question the effects.

British India. Hmmmm. Bad enough. The court of a Maharaja, a vastly wealthy hereditary ruler of his own little kingdom, tolerated by the British so long as he remains fairly docile. Hmmmm. Worse. It does allow one to write about lavish banquets and sporting massacres of birds, but it does also seem to force one to write about hundreds of servants with protruding ribs and such, and if one doesn’t show much sympathy for them, one’s reader might start to wonder how harmless the nostalgia is.

Golden-era plotting. Well, not much to complain about here, I suppose, though we probably didn’t need quite so many references to Christie to get the point. Perhaps, actually, the point is a little more subtle, since the references are principally to The Seven Dials Mystery, which is generally held to be a disappointing Christie novel precisely because it departs from the template. No departures here. The suspect list is circumscribed, each is given a motive, each is seen to act somewhat suspiciously, and eventually the detective works it out. I wasn’t enthralled, but it was done well enough.

That prose style. Huh. It’s clearly very deliberate, since it’s so different to that of the other Keating book I’ve read in this series (that one was plagued by the ghost of Wodehouse). It does evoke a certain air and era. But it’s also rather tiresome, I find. Perhaps I was just in a bad mood.

I noted in that last Keating review that he was a well-loved figure in British crime writing, and I don’t want to be mean, so I will just say that this passed a plane journey but is probably past its time.

Dick Francis, “Whip Hand” (1979)

I enjoyed this very much indeed, though it’s hard to say whether the book really merits that much enjoyment. The thing is, I read a fair few Francis novels in my early teens, so reading them again is an experience infused with nostalgia (this will probably be thematic throughout the 1980s and 90s).

Like most Francis novels, this is set in the world of horse racing. Francis was himself a jockey before turning to fiction, and knows the horsey stuff intimately. The protagonist is Sid Halley, an ex-jockey with an artificial hand who now works as a sort of specialised private eye for equine matters. The plot involves a trio of investigations: dodgy ownership syndicates, possible nobbling of runners, and a conman who’s swindled Sid’s ex-wife (he’s still best buddies with his father-in-law).

A fair amount of this is objectively silly (not least the artificial hand), and there are some ridiculous episodes in the book—an extended escape scene involving a hot-air balloon, for example. Also, that trio of investigations, plus all the stuff about Sid’s own feelings concerning his change of career and a bit of love life stuff, ought to amount to more plot plates than anyone can reasonably keep spinning. And yet Francis manages it. Setting aside the nostalgia and all, I think this is genuinely superbly done. There’s nothing flashy about the writing, nothing profound about the novel’s themes, and this is all to the good—it’s just a masterful, fun, pacey thriller, if you don’t think about it too hard and enjoy being taken for a ride.

As I said, I think I enjoyed the ride all the more for the fact that I used to read these things a lot (I’m genuinely unsure if I read this one all those years ago). One thing that struck me on re-reading is that young teen me had confused two alien worlds. As in many Francis novels, the milieu is upper-middle to genuine upper class. The father-in-law is a retired admiral, who Sid meets for regular drinks in a London club. There are various characters with titles, money is made in offhand ways that require wealth to start with, and everyone drinks champagne all the time and eats food with French names. There’s also a lot of casual bed-hopping. This was all completely foreign to young me, but I think I mistook its unfamiliarity for the unfamiliarity of adulthood. I somehow implicitly thought that all of this was what grown-ups do, not what poshos do. It’s weird to sort of reconstruct the contents and origins of a muddled way of thinking which was never properly conscious, and yet in retrospect was clearly present.

Now, you’re probably not going to get the same second-rate Proustian rush from this novel, but there is a sense of nostalgia or perhaps archaism available to all here. It has two sources. First, the novel somehow stinks of 1980s England. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it’s just the atmosphere, the environment, the faint sense that all of these people would have voted Thatcher (and yet aren’t eminently dislikeable). Second, the horse stuff. Racing’s popularity has dwindled markedly since 1979, and it’s hard to imagine that a series of novels set in stables and racecourses, heavily featuring the arcana of training and betting and all, would ever get off the ground today. I suspect that this is going to mean that Francis disappears into relative unread obscurity, despite having been an absolute book-selling machine at his height. And that’s a shame, because nostalgia aside, I think at his best (as here) he really is a first-rate writer of a fun thriller. Well worth picking up cheap second-hand and gobbling down over a long train journey or a day in a deckchair.