You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Back in 2014, I co-hosted a conference in London with the title Queens of Crime. As part of the festivities, we asked speakers to name their nominations for the current Queen of Crime. The laurels fell, mostly, to P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Val McDermid. Asked to name an upcoming Queen of Crime, speakers delivered an almost unanimous verdict: the American writer, Megan Abbott. At that point, I was only familiar with the brilliantly cool The Song Is You. When I read You Will Know Me last year, I remembered what people had said in. London -- and realised that it was coming to pass.

You Will Know Me (2016) is a stunning novel which reflects its context with ruthless, unnerving precision. It's also absolutely the kind of book that should be filmed. Perhaps this is hyperbole, but I think a film of You Will Know Me could become a defining document of American life in the 2010s.

The book is told from the point of view of Katie Knox, whose life revolves around her fifteen year-old daughter, Devon. Devon is a gymnast who has been pushed, all her life, to pursue perfection. There's talk of a future in the Olympics, and the community couldn't be more obsessed with her. But Devon -- whose foot, damaged in childhood, Katie cruelly dubs 'Frankenfoot' -- is not pursuing any medal or trophy for herself. She's been told what she wants and been told to work for it. Her body flits and contorts throughout the book's pages; a twisted canvas on which her parents paint their dreams.

In the run-up to an all-important competition, a handsome boy is killed and Katie suddenly has to look both beyond her daughter and deeper into her mind. Meanwhile, Devon's overlooked brother steps into the spotlight... With every new turn, the novel's title becomes more and more sinister as Abbott explores what it means when we can't know the people we love.

From the very first paragraphs we know what this book is going to be about:

The vinyl banners rippled from the air vent, the restaurant roiling with parents, the bobbing of gymnast heads, music gushing from the weighty speakers keeled on the window ledges.

Slung around Devon's neck were three medals, two silver and one gold [...] 'I'm so proud of you, sweetie,' Katie whispered in her daughter's ear. 'You can do anything.'

And just like that, we know that the parent-child relationship will come under scrutiny. We know that Devon is a high achiever with no agency. We know there's something stirring in the 'rippled' celebrations, and something ready to break in the 'gushing', 'weighty', 'roiling' celebration. Megan Abbott doesn't waste a word. Her vocabulary is stark and cutting. She tends towards single-word sentences in You Will Know Me, or fragmented -- broken -- by -- dashes. Words are everywhere in this book -- words that deflect, words that mislead, words that hide truths, and words left unspoken.

Taken as a murder mystery, I can understand why You Will Know Me might seem a little ... lacklustre. But taken as a disturbing psychological thriller, it's both gripping and intense. It sticks with you long after you close the last, haunting page. It turns, spins, and contorts itself behind your eyes.

Death at the President's Lodging by Michael Innes

When I was twelve, I started running out of Agatha Christie books to read. This meant two things: first, I would have to ration the remaining dozen or so, and, second, in order to ration them I would have to find other great writers to enjoy. To date, I’ve not found anyone who can give me the same thing Christie does, although I was perfectly happy juggling Ngaio Marsh for plot and Iris Murdoch for psychology in my late teens.

Anyway, I consulted the lovely Book People. This was the olden days of 2002 so the internet was not very glorious and I ordered some books from a glossy brochure. It was a set of five ‘classic crime’ books by Penguin, sampling five classic writers: Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Edmund Crispin, Josephine Tey, and Michael Innes. I read Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke and thought it was okay. Likewise, Tey’s The Franchise Affair (rereading a few years ago, I updated my verdict to AWESOME). I was already a Crispin fan so found The Moving Toyshop predictably wonderful. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown disappointed me, which the Father Brown stories continue to do. There was only one book in the set that I couldn’t read: Death at the President’s Lodging (1936) by Michael Innes.

Time and again, I tried. But it was so dull. The prose was so smug and referential and the characters were so uninteresting that I couldn’t get into it. This was particularly unfortunate because, thinking from the title that it was a political thriller, I’d elected to do a school project on the book! For years I thought that Michael Innes was only good for one thing: teaching me how to skim the pages of a book and talk about it without having read it.

Then, at 19, in a particularly dark time of my life, I picked up at random an old copy of Hare Sitting Up, a very different Innes novel, and I loved it. I couldn’t believe that this was the same writer. It never occurred that I was simply too young to understand Death at the President’s Lodging the first time.

A few weeks ago, a helpful friend informed me that I read boring books. This immediately made me think of Death at the President’s Lodging, so I sought it out and opened it up. And I read. And read. And read.

This book was Innes’s debut, and the pilot for his detective John Appleby’s five-decade career. It’s a witty and sophisticated whodunit that positively revels in its artificiality. The set-up is this: the president of a university college has been found murdered, and around his body are piles of human bones.  It’s not quite a locked-room mystery, but rather a locked-community one because the president’s lodgings are in a sequestered part of the college, only accessible to a select few dons. I say ‘locked community’ rather than ‘closed community’ because Innes does a fantastic job of showcasing academia in ridiculous and resolute isolation from the real world.

It’s this isolation, this absolute silliness of the community about which Innes writes, that makes his solution work. On the face of it, the final chapter is ludicrous beyond parody, but the author sets it up so well, and with such unreality, that it makes perfect sense. Innes was, of course, a pseudonym for James Innes Mackintosh (J.I.M.) Stewart (1906-1994), a widely-travelled Oxford don.

There are seven suspects in this mystery, and each man is implicated by an embarrassment of clues. It’s up to Inspector Appleby to sift the real from the contrived:

[I]n the network of physical circumscriptions implicitly pointing […] to so-and-so there was contrivance in a literary tradition deriving from all the progeny of Sherlock Holmes, while in the fantasy of the bones there was something of the incongruous tradition of the ‘shocker.’ Somewhere in the case, it seemed, there was a mind thinking in terms both of inference and of the macabre. … A mind, one might say, thinking in terms of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, come to think of it, was a present intellectual fashion, and St Anthony’s was an intellectual place. …

I love it when crime fiction does this. What I didn’t love so much was the smugness of Appleby’s many literary references, or the fact that beyond occasionally quoting someone learned, he has no discernible personality. From what I have read, Future Appleby never gets decently characterised, although he does go on in later books to acquire a wife, a daughter, a promotion, and a retirement package.

Death at the President’s Lodging has a bit of a first-novel-vibe to it, but, that said, it’s a bloody good debut.

Mini reviews # 1

The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde by Erle Stanley Gardner (1944). Perry Mason is in fine form, in a world of seedy families and glamorous blondes.

News of Paul Temple by Francis Durbridge (1949). Charmingly innocent and retro fun concerning a new super war weapon. The mystery is not at all challenging but the reading experience is sheer escapism.

Poisoned Cherries by Quintin Jardine (2002). A star-studded case for Oz Blackstone, and quite possibly the worst detective novel I have ever read.

The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (2014). A competent pastiche of Raymond Chandler's style, giving us a fresh case for Philip Marlowe. It's a good book, although the metaphors ('an Adam's apple like a ping pong ball') have nothing on Chandler's ('A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window'!).

Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris (2016). Intensely readable, cinematic thriller that is crying out for a life on the big screen. At nearly 400 pages, I read it in a day. Paris creates a believable middle-class heroine in an utterly incredible and horrific situation.

Death and Aunt Fancy by Edmund Crispin

A delightful and very brief short story that is collected in Fen Country, 'Death and Aunt Fancy' (1953) is being issued to readers for free by Peters Fraser Dunlop on behalf of Edmund Crispin's estate. To read the story, simply sign up to their newsletter.

The story was first published in Colliers Magazine in 1953, and has been reproduced a few times since, perhaps because it's conveniently short. But it's also very good.

'Death and Aunt Fancy' is only four pages long and as a mystery it's satisfying without being challenging. A 'tubular' man in his mid-fifties, George Gotobed, visits his long-estranged aunt and her companion. Within minutes, his aunt has uttered some cryptic words and George departs, confused. Not long later, there's a murder...

Gervase Fen, the eccentric Oxford don whom I fell in love with as a boy, appears in a wonderful sketch, hearing the problem and solving it on the spot. I am so pleased that something is being done with Crispin's estate, and hoping that the BBC TV project by Mark Gatiss, which was supposed to happen in 2016, materialises one day. There was something magical and frustrating, as a teenager, in trying to gather together as many Crispin books as I could, because nobody had heard of him and only The Moving Toyshop was in print.

If you're new to Crispin, or to Fen, 'Death and Aunt Fancy' is a good -- free -- place to start. If you're an aficionado, or just a fan, I'd love to chat. My favourite Fen mystery is Love Lies Bleeding. What's yours?

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

This review was first published on Goodreads in 2013.

The House of Silk (2011) has been touted as the first ever Sherlock Holmes continuation novel -- a statement as blatantly ridiculous as the author's prose.

First off: Arthur Conan Doyle would never have written this novel. Book length, paragraph structure, and an emphasis on over-explained historical detail mark this out as pastiche, however reverent. But that in itself doesn't matter: Arthur Conan Doyle is dead. Much as we might like to read another work by him, we won't (except for John Smith and the like, but, really.... no). Sherlock Holmes means different things to us now so an attempt to mimic his creator's style, which cannot be successful, arguably shouldn't be the most important part of the 'first' new official Holmes novel.

Some things do matter, though. The prose is barely edited (Since when did Watson call Holmes 'Sherlock'? and some words are employed with truly unique interchangeability: flora/fauna and council/counsel; it is frankly messy. Anthony Horowitz's style here is inconsistent, flitting between pastiche and his own unique voice. And, unfortunately, Horowitz generally writes prose for children. He is a master plotter – hence his success with conservative television viewers – but not a master prosist. While Arthur Conan Doyle was hardly Balzac, Horowitz is worse. He doesn’t just tell, rather than show; he is preachy without quite knowing what he’s being preachy about, and seems incapable of doing any historical research without drawing our attention to it.

For example:

It sometimes occurs to me now, having witnessed so many momentous changes across the years, that I should have described at greater length the sprawling chaos of the city in which I lived, perhaps in the manner of Gissing - or Dickens, fifty years before.

Yeah, this totally hooks us in and convinces us that we're in the nineteenth century. Yeah, this is totally not written for kids...

Although the style suggests a children’s novel – and I believed that this was one for the longest time – the novel’s conclusion (rendering it a whodunit-style narrative rather than a really Holmesian adventure) is most certainly adult in content. Horowitz is very proud of this conclusion, which he reckons allows him to explore the conditions of vice and sin in Victorian London upon which ACD was 'unable' to reflect. Was he really unable to reflect? Really? Doyle was very involved in politics, social welfare, charity, and the military. He was regularly consulted by Scotland Yard and voiced opinions on Jack the Ripper, the laws against homosexuality, the First World War, homelessness, and even the disappearance of Agatha Christie. He did not bring these things into his Holmes stories because, far from being incapable of reflecting upon them, he deemed them inappropriate, once pointing out that 'a man passes a merry hour with a detective story' but should never under any circumstances have learnt anything after reading it! His fiction was escapist, not provocative-for-the-sake of it, and Horowitz's reflection on child prostitution (I won't say more on this, but I found it unspeakably offensive) doesn't quite know what it's doing in this kind of novel.

Well-plotted, clichéd, intellectually vapid, and with utterly un-Holmesian characters, Horowitz's novel resembles a children's book that has been revised by PD James and proofread by an intern from The Guardian. On two occasions, Horowitz unconsciously paraphrases Agatha Christie, who is much more in evidence (though not well-served) here than is Doyle.

And yet! What did I find in the back of my paperback edition? Only an excellent essay by the author, explaining all the challenges he faced in writing 'The New Sherlock Holmes Novel'. His experience writing formulaic whodunits, he avers, is 'absolutely completely irrelevant' since 'Doyle's approach was completely different'. For one thing, he notes, Doyle did not really write about murder and rarely reflected on the historical and social conditions of Victorian London. He sets out ten rules for writing a Holmesian pastiche that is faithful both to its predecessors and to a modern audience. These include, 'no women', 'no drugs', appropriate research, no homoeroticism, and a modest body count.

If only he had stuck to any of these rules or practised anything of what he'd preached! (Although 'no women', 'no drugs', and 'no homoeroticism' say more about Horowitz than they do about Doyle.) It would have been a very different novel. While we're on homoeroticism, I should point out one thing that struck me as authentic and appropriate for a neo-Victorian novel. Three times, Dr Watson's friendship with Holmes is compared to his marriage. Watson, Mrs Watson, and the sinister (and pointlessly-inserted) Professor Moriarty all note that the doctor seemingly loves and values his friend more than he does his wife. At one point he rushes off to help Holmes escape from prison while his wife dies of cholera. I thought this was one of the most interesting aspects of a dreadfully dull novel, and surprisingly on-the-ball for its author.

Without being commissioned by Doyle’s estate, The House of Silk would never have been written. And without that estate’s endorsement, it would not be garnering any attention whatsoever.

Fire Dance by Caroline Graham

Caroline Graham is based in Suffolk (where I live!) and is best-known as the creator of ITV's Midsomer Murders -- although has a justifiably lukewarm view of the series. Anyone who's glanced at her novels will know that they haven't been served well on television (that flawless first episode, The Killings at Badger's Drift, is an exception). Even John Nettles, DCI Barnaby himself, has written frankly that 'the Barnaby novels [are] better than their television counterparts', and 'much more interesting'. You can read his introduction to A Place of Safety in the Amazon preview. Today, I'm reviewing Graham's first-published novel, which is not a crime story at all.

When I was 13 I read all Caroline Graham’s detective novels with a greedy keenness. I loved them – the rather awkward writing style, the wry observation of character, and the black, bleak humour that I knew I was too young to fully understand. It was like a prolonged conversation with the very sharp relative we all wish we had.

The only of her adult novels that I didn’t read at the time was Fire Dance (1982). The first reason for this was that it was out of print. The second reason was that whenever the book was discussed it was as a ‘romantic novel’ and a very bad one at that – something that failed to help the author break through. But the other day, after following up a rumour, which proved to be false, that she had written a new crime thriller, I ended up buying this book on impulse. And I’m glad I did.

I think one reason that Graham herself has disavowed this book is because she doesn’t own the copyright: so there’s nothing in it for her. And it is very much a first novel – for one thing, it’s a lot shorter than the sprawling Barnaby narratives, and for another all the Graham hallmarks are there but not quite developed. In every Graham novel, this included, characters show their hedonism by taking scented baths, or they show their naivety by working for the BBC – I’m not sure what these facts tell us but it’s interesting to note that they remain constant throughout the author’s career!

The influences of Ruth Rendell and Iris Murdoch are much more overt here than they are in the later books, and Graham switches POV mid-paragraph, sometimes apparently unsure of who is speaking or thinking: this is toned down in later titles, but has always been the one weak point of her prose style. Nonetheless, Fire Dance is a good book, and a gripping read. I read it in a day.

This is not a romantic novel. No major couple survives the narrative (although the foreword warns us there will be a marriage, it becomes clear that it will be a rather dark, abusive one). It’s a psychological thriller about the twisting power of obsession. Kate, a rich and privileged woman, is obsessed with David, an older, widowed psychologist. David is obsessed with Anne, our unkempt, dead-behind-the-eyes protagonist. Anne is obsessed with a waxwork of Lord Byron – and we suspect, then know, that this has something to do with her father.

Perhaps this isn’t the most inviting or detailed plot summary – but to really experience the pleasure of Fire Dance is to read it. As a novel, it’s not going to set the Thames alight, but it isn't a bad read.

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (2013) is the second in a series by Sara Gran and as yet her most recent book. I won this intriguingly-designed paperback ages ago -- it feels like it was before the internet was invented, but must have been within the last four years -- in a Faber competition but never got around to reading it until last month. And then I devoured it. This was my first taste of DeWitt and of Gran.

So this is an unusual, very intelligent private eye thriller with unspeakably cool twists on all the conventions of American noir. I am in love with Gran's near hysterical writing style and compulsively drawn to the utterly screwed-up DeWitt.

DeWitt tells us the story of her murdered boyfriend and of her sordid, drug-addled investigation. I loved how completely flawed this character was -- not in a 'look here's some depth' way, but in an old-school 'I-need-to-do-coke-in-this-suspect's-bathroom-for-them-to-make-sense' way. Driving around Los Angeles and meeting increasingly ridiculous (but painfully believable) hipsters, DeWitt retreats into her childhood and soon realises that the resolution to this mystery lies in the false resolutions of the past.

Sometimes the writing gets Chandler-esque, and downright poetic. For instance, DeWitt tells us, on the second page:

Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song. 1962, 'I Wish That We Were ________.'

Later, Gran/DeWitt has some astonishingly thoughtful one liners -- 'Everyone thinks their grief is the first grief' -- and brilliant ways of nailing a character -- 'He'd been nagging me, like when the dentist sends you those little cards reminding you of a visit.' But the author has not just taken all the hallmarks of good hardboiled crime and switched the genders. She's done something much cleverer, more thoughtful and more trippy which I don't fully understand but cannot stop reading.

Absorbing the second Claire DeWitt book has made me keen to read the first. Not just keen; I have an addict's need. If for no other reason, I want to read Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011) to find out more about Jacques Silette, DeWitt's enigmatic mentor who is now dead and who crops up every now and then, in the form of cryptic passages from his manual, Détection.

According to this very old interview, there's going to be a third book, set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I just hope this isn't a red herring. Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway is dazzlingly weary, funny, and intoxicating.