Procession - to Prison - Donald Henderson

 Donald Henderson was an interesting fellow.  Born in London in 1945 he was successively a stockbroker, actor, BBC staffer and pioneer of British noir crime.  He died of lung cancer, far too soon, in 1947.

I say noir because that is precisely what the poorly titled Procession - to Prison (1937) is.  I have read and reviewed a couple of novels written twenty years later by my fellow Nelsonian Maurice Proctor, credited by many as the initiator of the genre, and they are nowhere near as black as this.

To start with, it's not a whodunnit.  We know from the outset who is on his way to be hanged.  The question for about two-thirds of the book is, who did he kill?  Even when we know that Henderson pulls the rug out from under us when body parts are found and the garden dug up.  It's very clever, very tightly focused.

Alfred Willibur is a middleaged shopkeeper whose wife Mill has turned bitter with disappointment and whose daughter Megsy is about to marry car mechanic Eric Lord and flee the nest.  Everything comes to the boil when the Williburs' landlord sells the premises to an ambitious local farmer who turns it into a dairy outlet and installs a young woman to help Alfred in the shop.

Mill will have nothing to do with the new business.  She takes in a lodger, an eccentric old biddy, and lets bitterness eat at her health.  Ultimately Eric and Megsy take Mill away for a seaside break at Margate.  Alfred stays behind with the shop help and the demanding old woman upstairs.  As the week goes on, he finds himself with decisions to make.

Henderson has a choppy style and some irritating habits (three dots to start a sentence? what's that about?).  But the novel has really interesting psychological depth.  Essentially it's a study about ordinary people trying to find fulfillment in life.  What is especially diverting is the way characters deal with the trauma of the murder act.  Procession - to Prison is by no means Henderson's best known novel - that's probably Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and the one I really want is the BBC-based A Voice Like Velvet - but it has been a fascinating introduction to his work.

Vine Street - Dominic Nolan

 An absolute stunner!  One of The Times' Crime Books of the Year and no wonder.  I was unfamiliar with Dominic Nolan but now I am mad keen to read his two earlier books Past Life and After Dark.

Vine Street has everything we could want in contemporary British noir - metropolitan vice, gangsters, dodgy coppers, serial sex murders - and a truly jaw-dropping plot twist about three-quarters of the way through.  Vine Street spans seventy years, from 1935 to 2005, mostly concentrating on the Fascist ascendancy before WWII and the war itself.  The lead characters are Leon Geats, a copper born to police the mean streets of Soho, his assistant Constable Billie Massie (female) and Mark Cassar, formerly of Vice, now risen to the Flying Squad and dreaming of greater things.  The three of them come together over the death of a whore which leads to a crew of French gangsters.  The trail runs cold but the bodies keep coming, into the Blitz and even after the war.  It is in the mid-Sixties that they finally uncover a suspect and even then there are secrets to be kept.

Six hundred plus pages of tense narrative, beautiful prose, staggering plot.  A work of pure genre genius.