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.

The Smiling Man - Joseph Knox

OK, I was ambivalent about Knox's debut, Sirens, but I was interested enough to read this, the second Aidan Waits novel.  No reservations now - Knox is up there with the best of his generation of British crime writers.  This is a proper novel, properly original, with the full novelistic strata of interlinked storylines - plus our first real insight into our hero's pitch-black backstory.

Waits is on permanent night duty, paired with the equally toxic DS Peter Sutcliffe, who lives up to his name.  They are investigating the arson of various litter bins when the call comes in from the closed pending sale luxury Palace hotel.  There's a man in room 413.  He's smiling.  He's dead.  The only real clue to his identity is an inscribed copy of the Rubiyat of Omar Khyam.  Waits traces this to a nurse called Amy.  They bring her in to identify the body.  She doesn't need to see his face.  There is obviously one foot too many for it to be her former lover.

Then there's the case of Cherry the streetwalker, whose body is fished out of the canal.  Only Cherry is really Christopher.  The whole plot unravels along these eccentric lines.  Ir's just brilliant.

I was going to end with "I can't wait for the next Waits novel,' but it turns out I can.  Knox's next book is a true crime story, set in Manchester., and called, fittingly, True Crime Story.  That is what I want to read asap.

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.