Mini reviews #29

Murdering Mr Monti (1994) by Judith Viorst. Judith Viorst is best-known as a self-help author, which is also the profession of this novel’s narrator. The opening gives you a good idea of the tone of the book, and also its American-ness: ‘I am not the murdering kind, but I am planning to murder Mr Monti because he is doing harm to my family. I don’t look like the murdering kind, being a short, blond, rounded very married lady, with bifocals and a softness under the chin. On the other hand, I don’t look like the kind who, just a few weeks before her forty-sixth birthday, slept with three different men within twenty-four hours. And since I did indeed do that, I might indeed be able to murder Mr Monti.’ A fun opening, and I bought the book on the strength of it, but the whole thing progresses along those lines and never really gets any further.

Deal Breaker (1995) by Harlan Coben. Harlan Coben is a guilty pleasure for me, and I justify it by reading the novels through a Sedgwickian lens. That is to say, I follow the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to read homosociality and what she called homosexual panic in masculine relationships. So, it is interesting that in Deal Breaker, two men — one preternaturally good looking — are allowed to bond intensely with shared memories of sleeping in a bunkbed at university, as long as a woman crops up on the next page and one of them talks about sex with her. There’s a lot of that sort of thing in Deal Breaker. It’s the first to feature Myles Bolitar, a sports agent whose client is horrified to discover his dead girlfriend apparently alive and advertising her services in a pornographic magazine. This is an easy read that you can whizz through in one sitting without thinking too deeply about it.

Hollow Crown (2002) by David Roberts. It’s 1936. Lord Edward Corinth (a pound shop Lord Peter Wimsey) is joined by left-wing journalist Verity Browne (a pound shop Harriet Vane) to investigate a murder, having originally been commissioned by Wallis Simpson, mistress to King Edward VIII, to recover some compromising letters.  This is a cosy, mindless mystery, peppered with references to the coming war. We know a character is stupid if they say stuff like ‘Hurrah for the blackshirts!’ and insisting, almost unprovoked, that there won’t be a war. They will of course always be challenged by a level-headed aristocrat who sees what we, with glorious hindsight, see: that war is coming and that it’s not necessarily a good thing. David Roberts has also developed a knack of getting in cliches by the back door. He simply ‘puts them in inverted commas’ and adds the words ‘as people say’, which somehow stops it from being bad writing. Not my cup of Ceylon, I’m afraid.

A Woman Unknown (2012) by Frances Brody. Kate Shackleton, Frances Brody’s northern interwar detective, is a delight. Here, she is roped into investigate the mysterious activities of a young wife and ends up looking into the murder of an American banker. One thing I particularly enjoyed about this novel was the focus on cameras and photography, which is not presented disingenuously as a new technology but showcased as a fashion. People collect cameras and boast about the comparative pros of their preferred models — which is how it must have been, of course — and the whole photography craze becomes important towards the end.

The Zig Zag Girl (2014) by Elly Griffiths. The first Stephens and Mephisto mystery showcases Elly Griffiths’ Golden Age influences, and proves that she is a rounded novelist who can master the detective genre from a range of angles. Set in Brighton in 1950, this novel is completely different in tone to the Ruth Galloway series. The opening line — ‘“Looks as if someone’s sliced her in three,’ said […] the police surgeon, chattily’ — introduces us to a narrative thats lightness of tone leaves the gives the understated darkness more power. The plot here takes us into the world of stage magic, with some absorbing, linger-in-the-mind characters, and a few caustic references to my home town, Great Yarmouth, which are always welcome.

Mini reviews #28

Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses (1959) by Georges Simenon. This entertaining short novel sees Maigret two years from retirement and pitted against a young proactive and self-important magistrate. The plot is not particularly interesting, but the sheer vitriol directed towards the magistrate and the generational shift he represents makes Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses well worth a read. There is also a nice insight into Maigret’s investigative techniques, as he persuades a very close-lipped family to talk simply by ‘bombarding them with questions’. My edition translated by Daphne Woodward.

City of Gold and Shadows (1973) by Ellis Peters. I really can’t get into Ellis Peters. I like some of her short stories, and after realising that the only novels of hers I’d tried to read were Cadfaels, I thought I’d have ago at a different one. City of Gold and Shadows has an irresistible set up, especially to a fan of Agatha Christie. Charlotte, whose archaeologist great-uncle has disappeared, sets out to an excavation site in Wales to find out what happened. When she stumbles upon a murder mystery with its roots in the Roman empire, she kind of gets out of the way so a male police inspector can magically turn up and investigate it. The mystery aspect is confident enough. The dialogue and thematic considerations are boring.

Dead Beat (1992) by Val McDermid. The first Kate Brannigan novel is an easy read and interesting mainly for showing how McDermid has evolved as a writer. Here, she wears her influences on her sleeve, and the book feels like an Agatha Christie story retold by a young Sara Paretsky. Brannigan goes looking for a missing song-writer and ends up in the seedier parts of both Leeds and the music industry. The format, though, is more conventional whodunit than gritty noir. It is an interesting midway point between the light and breezy (but morally assertive) Report for Murder, which I reviewed earlier this year, and McDermid’s contemporary thrillers, which are urgent and powerful but conservative enough to sit comfortably in the mainstream.

The Anarchists’ Club (2019) by Alex Reeve. Recently, I joined an online book club called Pigeonhole. It’s a really nice idea: you get new books in daily chunks (they call them ‘staves’, not entirely ‘getting’ why Dickens called instalments of A Christmas Carol the same thing) and can discuss them with other readers in comments on the margins. The first book I completed through Pigeonhole was The Anarchists’ Club. And I was very happy to be introduced to this novel, the detective Leo Stanhope, and the author Alex Reeve. The book is set in Victorian London and the really original aspect is that Leo, our hero, is transgender. It’s always shocked me that there aren’t any mainstream trans detectives and I was so happy to see the issue handled so sensitively, even if it is in a slightly glossed neo-Victorian setting. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I should have, because I was spoilt by reading an excellent novel on Pigeonhole at the same time, and I kept comparing them, which wasn’t constructive. I also hadn’t realised when I started that this was the second in a series, but all the key plot points from the first book were nicely explained, so that wasn’t really a barrier.  The real frustration for me — and sorry if this sounds awful — was the comments from other readers! People just can’t get their head round pronouns; it’s remarkable how much Leo’s struggles for basic life continue beyond the page. Leo is trying to keep a low profile and just get by, but he keeps stepping into the limelight by accident. This time, it’s because a woman is murdered and he is the only one who seems to care about looking after her fatherless children. The story is atmospheric and gripping, taking us from the low alleys of London to aristocratic country seats, via the music hall and a couple of meetings with Vesta Tilley. The topic of eugenics is dealt with intelligently and accessibly. I’m glad that Alex Reeve is writing.

The Language of Birds (2019) by Jill Dawson. Jill Dawson is one of the masters of literary genre fiction. She knows better than anyone else how to find an episode of history full of transcontextual human interest and to weave literary magic out of it. Her novel Wild Boy, about Victor of Aveyron, was the second novel I studied at university and every now and then I get fascinated in a subject — the Thompson-Bywaters case, Patricia Highsmith’s time in England — only to discover that Dawson has written an excellent novel about it. Her latest book is about the untold story of the nanny murdered by Lord Lucan, although the story uses fictional characters and settings to tell the tale. I wondered if this was because there are people — innocent, hurt people — who survived the scandal and are still living. According to the author’s afterword, which tells the true story explicitly, that is indeed the case. Nonetheless, the dialogue in the inquest scene is taken verbatim. The whole story is touching, expertly-written, and unsettling. In many ways, given that the Lord Lucan story is so well-known, reading it felt like re-reading a mystery novel: we already know the solution and how it ends, but we are spotting this we missed the first time. This is evident both in ‘clues’, for want of a better word: the nanny and the lady of the house look so similar, we keep getting told … But it’s also a masterful exercise in refocussing our attention onto a figure who is too often consigned in history to the rank of collateral damage.

Night By Night by Jack Jordan

Rose is an insomniac who has experienced more than her share of personal tragedy. One day, she comes across a journal, apparently written by a man who thinks he’s about to be murdered. When she takes it to the police, they don’t want to know. And before long, Rose has unravelled a dark, far-reaching conspiracy around the disappearances and deaths of several young gay men, including her own brother. The police, she realises, are not acting, partly because of institutionalised homophobia and partly because the case seems somehow close to home. Rose upturns her whole life pursuing the author of the journal and, when she fears the worst, pursuing justice.

Jack Jordan’s writing style is gripping. Night By Night (2019) is a page-turner. It’s also visceral and immersive. You feel what the characters are feeling, you see and hear what’s happening to them. You forgive the fact that somehow a man keeping a daily journal somehow knows what’s going to happen months in advance, and the author’s fondness for naff names. Because the story itself is so gripping. I read this with Pigeonhole, an online book club that gives you the book in ten (or ten-ish) daily chunks and facilitates group discussion via comments in the margins. It’s my first experience of Jack Jordan, and after reading I went on a Kindle spree to scoop up his back catalogue.

The novel is peppered with frequent references to a real serial killer. Stephen Port killed four gay men in London  in 2014, and the police did not do enough to stop him or to catch him. As one character says, ‘he continued to get away with it because the police failed to act in almost every way.’ Thereby, Jordan makes clear the social relevance of his novel.

There are ruthless, horrifying scenes of violence. And there are outright preachy bits. And there is a lot of misery and tragedy. But the moment that really stood out to me — that made me so emotional I had to stop reading for a bit — was a very simple, totally inexplicit one. Towards the end of the story, when the guilty party has been found out, Rose finds a diverse set of mobile phones, which belonged to the victims. They’ve all been gutted of sims and batteries and left, together, in a drawer. And something about that moment was incredibly haunting.

Several readers in the running comments pointed out that they weren’t enjoying the violence or, more often, the implausibility. The first case of this occurred when a male character meets an attractive man outside a coffee shop, gets chatting, and leaves with his number. ‘Who would accept a phone number from a stranger?!’ people quipped. Those people, I would guess, have little experience of gay culture, where merely being out to each other is a tremendous icebreaker. The narrator doesn’t always make rational choices — again, readers cried foul. But the narrator is an insomniac tortured by grief and guilt. Of course her choices aren’t going to be rational all the time. It would be implausible if they were. And there’s a scene with a psychiatrist who acts … well, very unprofessionally. ‘A psychiatrist would never do that!’ Again, I have a real-life story that says otherwise. So, when everyone started moaning about the implausibility of a character escaping from being buried alive — something I don’t have experience of — I wasn’t hugely inclined to listen to them. In fact, I think that the fact that so many people found so much in this novel hard to swallow helps the author make his point.

META MATTERS

Rose visits a police station and is disorientated by the lack of a two-way mirror and the general inhospitality of the set-up. Her ideas of what the police would be like have been conditioned by glamorous crime dramas on TV, but the real world is much less polished, more human, and nastier.