True Crime Story - Joseph Knox

 True Crime Story is post-modernist crime fiction.  It does what Truman Capote tried in In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer developed in The Executioner's Song - but goes one stage further.  Where they novelised on real world crimes and criminals, Joseph Knox has made fictional crime seem real.  He uses the tropes of true crime documentaries - first person narratives, intercut and conflicting; expert commentary; even the making-of narrative - to persuade us, as we read, that this really happened.  Someone had to do it and Joseph Knox, who broke through with Sirens and The Smiling Man (both reviewed on this blog) is as good a candidate as any.

Knox is the best practitioner of contemporary Manc noir, thus True Crime Story is set in and around Manchester University at the end of the autumn term 2012.  Fresher Zoe Nolan disappears from a student tower block party.  At first, naturally, it is assumed she's just wandered off.  But her parents arrive and join her flat-mates (who include Zoe's twin, Kim) in raising the alarm.  Zoe is not the type to disappear - Kim is the 'bad' twin.  A sex tape is produced, apparently seen at the party itself, in which Zoe is having sex with the sleazy posh boy Andrew Flowers.  Flowers has been seen with dropout drug-dealer Jai Mahmood.  Liu Wai, who was obsessed with Zoe, stirs the pot along with Fintan Murphy, who claims to have been close to Zoe.  But most insistent of all is the twins' father, Robert, who had invested all his hopes in Zoe and her singing career.  He drives the press coverage, makes Zoe's disappearance a national obsession.  A charitable trust is founded in her name, to financially assist other young women of talent and to keep Zoe's name in the public eye.

Over the next seven years the lives of those around Zoe move on, not necessarily in a good way.  A young writer, Evelyn Mitchell, starts interviewing them in the hope of securing a deal for a book.  She turns for guidance to none other than Joseph Knox who, before he became the breakout author of modern Manc noir was peripherally involved in the Nolan case.  We see some of the email interchange between them as Evelyn develops her theories.  Evelyn ultimately solves the mystery but it is Knox who completes the book and does the additional interviews for this, the second edition.

It is very clever, very well done, and though I finally guessed who was responsible, I didn't work out how that person had fixed their alibi.  The book is full of such twists and turns as it should be.  You can't do a mystery with a small circle of suspects without parading each in turn as Suspect Number One.  Some twists work better than others, which again is inevitable.

I enjoyed it.  I really appreciated the craft and skill on display.  But I don't particularly want to read anything else like it.  It's in effect a literary conjuring trick.  Very impressive - until you start to deconstruct how it was done.

Homicide Blonde - Maurice Proctor

 

A second Murder Room reissue by my fellow Nelsonian, this one from 1965, eleven years after the first Inspector Martineau, Hell is a City, which I reviewed on this blog about a month ago.  With strong overtones of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a child killer is stalking the industrial quarter of Granchester.  Then it turns out that the killer is not actually picking children, he's after blondes.  A teenage woman is taken, then an older woman.  One of Martineau's murder squad coins the term 'Homicide Blonde'.

Proctor has honed his craft over the series.  He juggles two suspects, both men dominated by their mothers, both chasing the final victim.  Martineau investigates a possible ancestry clue, which is certainly different. There is a wonderful misdirection about halfway through and a savage twist at the end.  Thoroughly enjoyable and absolutely recommended.

Hell is a City - Maurice Proctor

 

I knew there had to be one somewhere!  A fellow Nelsonian who wrote classic British noir crime fiction.  And here he is, Maurice Proctor, one of the founders of the form, with this very novel in 1954.  Ok, Nelson might have its hellish side but it's not a city.  The city here is Granchester, not to be confused with the Old Vicarage at Grantchester, but very much to be confused with Manchester in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The armed robber Don Starling has escaped from prison and is believed to be headed home to Granchester.  There, his lifelong nemesis Inspector Harry Martineau awaits.  The two men went to school together and hated one another even as children.  Meanwhile a local bookie's female assistant is snatched while taking the St Leger proceeds to the bank.  Martineau finds her body out on the moors.  Is Starling involved?

What gives this fairly ordinary crime caper its noirish flavour is the linkage between police and criminals.  Not only do they live and work alongside one another, but both draw the line and killing a young woman for money.  Martineau and the robbed bookie both have unhappy marriages.  Martineau is not the pillar of rectitude he appears to be.  He drinks too much and is inevitably drifting towards an affair with a local barmaid.  Any hint of impropriety will extinguish his hopes of promotion.  Recapturing Don Starling, on the other hand, will guarantee advancement.

The Starling and Martineau narratives run alongside one another - another noirish trope.  They come together in a spectacularly set up rooftop showdown in the city centre.  By this point Starling has nothing left to lose and Martineau no longer cares about promotion.  Both men are armed - perfectly credibly - despite the fact that in 1954 no British coppers routinely carried weapons.  And glowering over their deadly encounter is the shadow of the hangman, the legendary Albert Pierrepoint, whose equally legendary pub is namechecked in the book.

I'd never heard of Maurice Proctor.  Thank goodness for Murder Room and other reprint publishers. Hell is a City - great title for a fantastic story. I've already bought another Martineau in ebook.  Can't wait.

Sirens - Joseph Knox

At last – Manc noir! Deep black crime set in good old Manchester. When all is said and done, whyever not? Manchester has been derelict, the great British industrial wasteland, for over fifty years to my knowledge. When I taught there in 1980-1 the kids were battling racist cops led by a fascist religious maniac in the streets of Moss Side. They broke into the cop shop and stole the Special Branch murder kit the Met had hidden there.

Wait a minute … I’m talking myself into this, aren’t I?

To an extent, Joseph Knox has beaten me to it. Only to an extent. I don’t think he’s old enough to remember the good old days when every copper with aspirations was hopelessly corrupt, certainly in my Northern experience of the time. It is of course a matter of fact with the Met. Pretty much permanently. But I believe the war on the miners and the Hillsborough disaster were what separated proper cops from the scum. Cops are much better now.

But not according to Knox in Sirens. His cop, Aidan Waits, is suspended for corruption (stealing drugs from the station) and trying to save his career by doing a deep undercover job for his Superintendent. His investigation is complicated when a local MP enlists him to find his seventeen year-old daughter. Both jobs mean getting inside the Franchise, the main drug operation of the moment. This Waits does easily. He finds the girl – but then she is murdered. If Waits can’t find who did it, he’s going to get fitted up. Suddenly all the good guys are out to kill him while all the bad guys and gals want to help. In the manner of top quality noir, things become very grey. He sorts it, of course, because he was always intended to be a series lead. The solution is complicated but satisfactory – perhaps one linkage too many.

The main problem, though – and it is by no means a fatal problem – is that neither Knox nor his editor know when to end. It’s a series, guys – we can catch up with folks next time round. Far better, in a noir, to leave a few threads loose.