Hellfire - Karin Fossum

 

It's been a while since my last Fossum.  This instalment in her Sejer series dates from 2014 but is set ten years earlier.  Two one-parent families prepare for Christmas.  Bonnie and Simon, a care worker and her young son; and Mass and Eddie, a middleaged woman and her twenty-one year-old with mild learning difficulties.  The following summer, an horrific double murder is discovered in an abandoned caravan.  Sejer and Skarre investigate.

Fossum is very much the Ruth Rendell of Nordic Noir.  Her characters' psyches are explored in detail while the Confucian cop goes quietly about his business.  Like Rendell, Fossum never fails to draw me in, whatever her subject matter.  Hellfire is one of her best.

Ghost Stories - M R James

Why is it I didn't take to the stories of Thomas Ligotti (see below) but fell instantly under the spell of M R James?  They have much in common - James is obviously a key influence on Ligotti.  Both writers tend to use the same type of narrator - learned, single, often a writer - and both use distancing devices such as "this is the story as someone told it to me."  I have thought about it for some days now, and have concluded that the difference is the attitude of the narrator/protagonist.  Ligotti's are inert, accepting, and thus alienate us; James's academic old buffers, on the other hand, rebel against their disturbing experiences and strive to put the world back in order.  That makes them appealing.  They do what we would hope to do in their position.

This selection, for Vintage Classics, includes an introduction by Ruth Rendell.  I like Rendell but hate it when publishers feel they need to add a 'name' to a classic.  This introduction is amiable enough but in the end it is piffle.  It tells us nothing about James and even less about his works.

On to the stories themselves, there are thirteen of them, naturally, and the best for me was the story "Number 13".  Can I say why I preferred it?  Well, to an extent.  It is odd, as hotel rooms tend to be odd, especially old hotels which have been converted from something else.  Hotel rooms strive to be comfortable, to be a temporary home from home, but they always fail because most of us can never be truly comfortable away from home.  We never fully have our bearings because there's always somewhere else, staff areas and other people's rooms, which we cannot access.

As always with ghost stories, it depends what you find frightening.  If you have a problem with spiders, then James is definitely the boy for you.  Personally, it's the oddness rather than the apparition which unsettles me.  The flapping sheet on the beach in "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" is, for me, much scarier than the attack on Parkins by his bedsheets.  But even if the thing itself in a particular story doesn't raise your gooseflesh you can always enjoy the sheer mastery of James's writing.  James, of course, was far more learned than any of his protagonists; that means he does not need to show off, and he doesn't.  Instead his pen flows like Picasso's line, effortless and yet magnificent.

The Saint Zeta Society - Ruth Rendell

 

 A recent (2012) addition to the oeuvre, this is one of Rendell's stand-alone London underbelly novels, chronicling the criminality that goes on our very doorstep and the psycho next door.  In this instance the psycho is Dex, who thinks his phone is God (a clever conceit in itself).  It is not Dex who starts the murder ball rolling but he does his bit to finish it.

I love the setting - a very select square in what I thought was Chelsea but which turns out to be Pimlico.  I don't much care for the society formed by the 'servants', which only really serves as a device to get the core characters together.  The characters, though, are a fascinating bunch, from nanny Rabia, to so-called au pair Montserrat, to June, in service for sixty years to the "Princess" and Thea, who insists she's not a servant at all and gets dissed in the street for having red hair.  The characters I've listed are all female.  There are lots of male servants as well but none of them caught my interest in any way.  I would have liked more time with Dex in particular.

So, not one of Rendell's very best.  Then again, Rendell's second rate is ten times better than most people's best.  She really is, as Ian Rankin says on the back, the world's greatest living crime writer.

Saint Zita, by the way, is the patron saint of skivvies, apparently.

The Veiled One - Ruth Rendell

Volume 14 of the Wexford series, The Veiled One was written in 1988, about the time the author became seriously famous with the TV series and the creation of Barbara Vine.  It is thus quintessential Rendell with a strong foretaste of Vine - a murder mystery which turns on warped psychology.  There is also an interesting but unlinked subplot referencing the women's protest at Greenham Common.

It all starts in the run-up to Christmas when a woman's body is found in shopping centre carpark which Wexford himself has just left.  Indeed, the body is found close by where his car was parked.  The gruesome twist is that the woman was garrotted, a almost unique method in British murder.  Wexford is sidelined for a time - to explain why would be to spoil the plot - and in his absence Mike Burden takes up the investigation.  He becomes convinced he knows who the murderer is.  Is he right?  That's the beauty of Rendell's craft.  She keeps you guessing right to the end.  She doesn't cheat, she doesn't bend the rules, but relies solely on depth of character to keep you hooked.

A very, very good example of its genre, and as such highly recommended.

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy - Barbara Vine

Ruth Rendell is the greatest of contemporary female crime writers and is never better than when she writes as Barbara Vine.  This, however, is by no means Vine at her best.  The writing is beautiful, the characterisation and back story deep and immersive.  There is clever play with the levels of storytelling, which I particularly liked.  But the mystery upon which all this is hung is no mystery at all.  I'm afraid I figured it out from the get-go and I am usually hopeless.  So it was an enjoyable read but ultimately failed to satisfy on the key trope of its genre.

One of the blurbs on the back of the paperback describes it as frightening.  A conclusion I find inexplicable.