The Schoolgirl Murder Case - Colin Wilson

 When I was around 18 I loved Colin Wilson.   He seemed to be interested in everything I was, and even came from near where I lived (and still lived).   He was always on TV, the Common Man's polymath.   I read everything by him that I could find: The Occult, God of the Labyrinth, Ritual in the Dark.   A couple of years later I gave up on him completely.   His interest in murder seemed morbid, his interest in the occult slightly outdated.

Then for some reason, at the end of last year I became interested in him again.   Where once you could buy his books in any decent bookshop, now you can't find them for love nor money.   So I bought a whole bunch of them online.   I'm currently reading his 'reappraisal' of George Bernard Shaw, which I don't like at all but hoping to like better when he finally gets on to the plays, and just finished The Schoolgirl Murder Case, which I liked a whole lot more.

The title seems deliberately prurient.   It was probably a lot more so when the novel was written in 1974.   I should note that this was just before Wilson started publishing his true crime murder books.   In fact the victim is an adult woman who prostitutes herself to punters with a penchant for schoolgirls.   She is found in the front garden of a Hampstead house.   When Scotland Yard finally get permission to enter the house, they find the body of the owner's nephew, who was almost certainly the girl's client.

The dead man was a debauched dilletante with interests in the occult.  This leads Chief Inspector Saltfleet into an unfamiliar world of escoteric bookshops, occult artists and modern day witches.   Greg Saltfleet makes the book work by being resolutely normal, middleaged, happily married, good at his job and popular with his underlings.  The solution is perfectly reasonable and satisfactory.   I also liked the realism with which Wilson conveys the real nitty gritty of policing.   So many crime novelists find ways to get their cop out of the office and out of day-to-day policing.   Not Wilson; Saltfleet is a line manager with lots of cases to keep an eye on; Saltfleet also has higher-ups to inform and answer to.

Overall, very satisfactory.   I think I might try The Mind Parasites (not one of my recent purchases) next.   Either that or re-read Ritual in the Dark...  

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.

Past Life - Dominic Nolan

 Dominic Nolan's debut novel is standout.  A brilliant concept - a cop who has forgotten everything about her former life who seeks to find herself by completing her last case - brilliantly carried out.  

Abigail Boone is investigating a missing person case when she is kidnapped, abused, and thrown out of the window of a block of flats.  Her injuries alone would probably have ended her police career but there's the added problem of amnesia.  Apart from the last few minutes of her ordeal - trying to escape, falling - there's nothing.  Her husband and teenage son are strangers.  She now thinks of herself as Boone, a new person.

A couple of friends stick by her - an exploited young woman she rescued and her gangster father; one fellow female cop.  Husband and son do their best but Boone cannot find the love that must have been there before.  Slowly but surely she tracks down the other woman who was in the flat the night she fell, then the gangsters themselves.  The climax is genuinely thrilling but Nolan also manages to keep the tension taut for all the 400 pages, which is some achievement for a first-time novelist.

I have read a number of highly-touted young British crime writers over the last couple of years.  I have now read two of Dominic Nolan's three novels and have made up my mind: Nolan is the one to follow.

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.

Getting Carter - Nick Triplow

 

I've written before about Ted Lewis - see me reviews of GBH and Plender, below - but this is the book that led to those books being republished as No Exit titles.  That alone warrants bonus points to Nick Triplow, who also introduced the aforementioned.  To save time scrolling, I was staggered by the brilliance of GBH, less so by Plender.

This critical biography of the forgotten author falls somewhere between the two.  It is absolutely thorough on the life, but is shackled by the fact that Lewis was a pretty appalling person who had talent in abundance but drank it all away.  Far more interesting for me is Triplow's recreation of Hull and Humberside during Lewis's two periods of residence.  I was resident there between times and Triplow's account rings pitch perfect to me.

I also thoroughly enjoyed his assessments of the books and the field of pre-Lewis British noir crime fiction.  In summary then, a significant book which adds additional depth to the novels.  It's just a shame about Lewis himself. 

Plender - Ted Lewis

 

I loved Ted Lewis's GBH, and obviously love the movie of his Get Carter, but Plender not so much.  It is very much in the style of GBH, alternating chapters allowing first person narrative from each of the main characters, and set in Humberside when such a county existed in the late Seventies - but it is nowhere near as dark and nowhere near dark enough.

The plot hinges on a couple of coincidences, which is never a good place to start.  It is of course conceivable that two schoolfellows from the Lincolnshire side might meet up again twenty years later in Hull.  It is by no means beyond the realm of possibility that one (Plender) might have become a dodgy private investigator, the other (Knott) a photographer for mail order catalogues.  But that they should meet in a transvestite bar, when neither of them is a cross-dresser, on the very night that one of them accidentally brings about the death of a young woman ... well, that's stretching credibility a bit too far.

The final coincidence I didn't see coming and it rather took me by surprise when it did.  It is no more believable than the others but it allowed the story to spiral into darkness at last.  As such, I wish it had done so a lot sooner.  All in all, I'm afraid it reminded me of not-very-good TV drama of the period - A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and the like.

GBH - Ted Lewis

 

Ted Lewis (1940-82) is the missing master of British crime fiction.  He was born in Manchester, brought up and died (alcohol-related) in Humberside.  He wrote the novel that became the movie Get Carter before he was 30.  I was in Humberside for much of the Seventies.  I am a big fan of Get Carter.  Indeed, I first saw it in the Cecil cinema in Hull.  So how come I had never heard of Lewis until Amazon offered me the ebook?

Now, having read his final work - considered by many to be his masterpiece - I am amazed that Lewis and his work are not a subject of everyday conversation, at least among crime fans.  He didn't invent British noir - let's not forget the great James Hadley Chase, who was very much the British version of James M Cain - but he certainly brought it up to date and turned it very dark indeed.  He is absolutely a pioneer of what we now regard as noir.  And GBH is just about as dark as these things ever get.

George Fowler is a London gangster who has made a very considerable fortune from blue movies.  His gangland rivals, the Shepherdson brothers, have decided to declare war.  The text consists of very short chapters switching between two locations, the Smoke and the Sea, which means the out-of-season seaside resort of Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, where Fowler is hiding out under an assumed name.  Cleverly, Lewis uses present tense for Mablethorpe, past tense for London.  All bar the last couple of chapters are first person narration by Fowler, which means we are inside his head the whole time, and inside his head is not a pleasant place to be.  He is drinking heavily and may be losing his grip on reality.  Who, for example, is Lesley, the girl who turns up everywhere in Mablethorpe and reminds Fowler of ... what?  Where is Jean, Fowler's wife, who enthusiastically joined in all his activities, from orgies to murder?

Reading GBH was a revelation.  How can a writer this good be forgotten?  I admit, the common as muck name doesn't help, but he is a king compared to others now making a decent living out of the genre.  I must read more - the original Get Carter (originally called Jack's Return Home) for sure, and there's also the follow-up, intriguingly called Plender, described here as "a story of murder, pornography, blackmail and retribution set in the dockside streets of Hull and Humberside."  Oh yes, right up my street.

Cry Baby - Mark Billingham

 

The seventeenth Thorne novel is a prequel to the first, Sleepyhead.  It is 1996, the year football was supposed to be coming home, with the European Championships in London.  A seven year old disappears from a London park.  Thorne is a newly separated DS.  On a hunch he suspects one of the mother's neighbours.  The suspect's name is leaked to the press and he ends up killing himself, shortly before his alibi was proved.  Thorne suspects his DI, Gordon Boyle, of being behind the leak.  Certainly he blames Boyle for easing up on all other suspects.  At the same time Thorne knows full well that he made the same assumptions about the suspect - because he looked like a paedophile.  Thorne, however, does not ease up.

Billingham really is a master of his craft.  He leads us towards the real culprit and then misleads.  There is a terrific red herring involving the boy and his best friend, and a twist at the very end that I never dreamt was coming.  The climax itself is terrifically exciting.  I shall have to take it to pieces to find out how Billingham did it.  I mean, I read a lot of crime fiction and I am getting frankly cheesed off with the current crop of Jamie Bulger plotlines - yet my heart was genuinely thumping and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.

Much fun is also had with Thorne's first meeting with the punk pathologist, Phil Hendricks.

A great start for my reading new year.

Capital Crimes - (ed) Martin Edwards

Capital Crimes is one of the British Library's magnificent crime classics, edited by Martin Edwards, who oversees the entire series. What we have here are Golden Age short stories which share a London location. They range from Conan Doyle ('The Case of Lady Sannox', which I have reviewed elsewhere on this blog) to Anthony Gilbert ('You Can't Hang Twice'). Some are naturally better than others but for once there are no duds. My favourite is 'The Hands of Mr Ottermole' by Thomas Burke, 'the laureate of London's Chinatown' apparently, and definitely a breath of fresh air as a working class writer, and 'Cheese', an offbeat item from Ethel Lina White, author of what became Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

Duffy - Dan Kavanagh

Duffy is the first of four detective novels written in the early Eighties by Julian Barnes under the Kavanagh pseudonym. You soon realise why the literary Barnes went pseudonymous. Duffy is a bisexual ex-copper, dismissed over allegations of paedophilia, and his manor, then and now, is Soho, which in 1980 was still the only reliable source of prostitutes, dirty films, mucky mags and live sex shows for London visitors.

Duffy has set up his own security advice business. He gets a call from a bloke called McKechnie, who imports jokes and novelties. McKechnie is being extorted over an affair with his secretary. Duffy investigates - and finds himself embroiled in a gangland power-grab which ends up with him in a very delicate situation with a cheese-cutter.

The novel is smart, funny and brilliantly written - a microcosm of its time and place.

Broken Ground - Val McDermid

It was my intention to read the Karen Pirie novels in order but Broken Ground is the fifth, published in 2018. Fortunately McDermid is so skilled that it makes no real difference - she updates the reader on what they need to know, which is that Pirie's partner has been killed and she is in a period of bereavement.

The business of the Historic Cases Unit goes on however. At first it seems the body found alongside two wartime Harley Davidson motorbikes is outside the unit's remit. They only deal with deaths less than seventy years old in which there is a realistic chance of relatives and witnesses who are still living. Closer examination reveals the dead man is wearing trainers from 1995. Pirie and her gormless assistant Jason 'The Mint' Murray enter the world of wartime double agents, contemporary professional strongmen and motorhome etiquette of the mid-nineties.

The plot rolls out over 500 pages which unfold like a dream. I didn't much like the flashbacks but they were effective enough as a device for delivering the back story. I thoroughly enjoyed the development of the main characters and I especially enjoyed McDermid's daring finale in which Karen arrests her suspect but all her problems are left hanging for the next installment. So what am I supposed to do now, Val, if I find myself looking at Volume 2 and Volume 6? I know, the answer is obvious (get both), but which do I read first?

The Distant Echo - Val McDernid

The Distant Echo has, with hindsight, become the first in the Karen Pirie 'cold case' series. I make what might seem an odd point because whilst it is a cold case and Karen Pirie is in charge of the file, she doesn't appear until about 360 pages in and contributes nothing to solving the case.

What in fact we have is a dense, two-part crime story. In 1978 a bunch of mates, studying together at St Andrews University, stumble upon a body in the snow. Rosie Duff was nineteen, a barmaid at one of the student pubs. She has been raped and stabbed and dumped in the old Pictish graveyard. The boys are initially treated as suspects. They were drunk, they had access to a suitable vehicle, all bar one are of the right blood group. But there is no real evidence. They are bailed, their names leaked to the Press. It is assumed by all they are guilty. They are so overwhelmed by the pressure that one tries to commit suicide. In trying to save him, the lead investigating officer, DI Maclennan, loses his life. In effect, whoever killed Rosie is now responsible for the deaths of two people.

That story makes up about half of a 560-page book. The detail is immense, the characterisation forensically detailed. Flash forward twenty-five years. It is now 2003 and forensic science has moved on considerably, albeit nowhere near so much as it has today. Police all over the world are re-opening old cases in light of the latest advances in DNA profiling. The Chief Constable of Fife has decided to get with the programme and has set up a small cold case unit. Karen Pirie has the Rosie Duff profile, which is very much a priority, given that the other cold case officer is the younger brother of the late Maclennan and James Lawson, the first police officer on the scene, is now ACC Crime with special responsibility for the unit.

The four original suspects are now spread across both sides of the Atlantic. Alex and Ziggy are still close, even though Ziggy is a paediatrician in Seattle while Alex is a Glasgow manufacturer of greeting cards. Tom aka Weird became an evangelical Christian under the pressure of the original investigation and now conducts a TV ministry in America. Davey is a lecturer in French and has no real contact with the others, despite living barely an hour's drive from Alex and despite the fact that has sister Lynn has long been married to Alex.

No sooner has the case been reopened than Ziggy dies in a fire. Then a second member of the quartet is murdered. Another is attacked in the street and left for dead. The list of suspects is long and the police have no new leads. The evidence from the original investigation into Rosie's murder has gone missing.

The Distant Echo (not a great title) is a fabulous, serious, psychological and procedural crime novel. It demonstrates why McDermid is the grande dame of Tartan Noir. It is essential reading for students of the genre. I got it because I had seen a review for the latest Karen Pirie. I'm now seeking out the rest of the series.

Bloodline - Mark Billingham

Hard to say where Bloodline fits into the Tom Thorne series. I suspect it is Number 8. Does it matter? Not really. Bloodlines is still the right side of the dividing line which threatens all series - it is a crime thriller with bits of character development thrown in, rather than a character novel with bits of crime bolted on. In fact Billingham handles the 'personal life' stuff very well here. There is a major domestic crisis which reflects the main crime theme but the character development is that both Thorne and his partner Lou bury their feelings in their police work and prioritise the crime.

It is a serial killer story because Billingham is essentially a writer of very dark noir. The question is, in an era where genetic research is everything, can serial killing be an inherited trait? Essentially, the supposed son of a famous serial killing is going round killing the children of his father's victims in order to 'prove' that his father was obeying genetic code rather than personal inclination. It's a great idea, handled well on the whole, though I would have preferred some deeper development. Billingham rather handicaps himself in that respect by sending super-pathologist Hendricks, the fount of all theoretical argument in Thorne's world, to a conference in Sweden.

My only other reservations are these: I didn't care for the tricksy prologue and quickly fathomed out its relevance; and I really didn't like the killer's journal. These are very minor quibbles. I'm sure other people thought they were great. Yes I guessed who dunnit as soon as we were introduced but that to me is no problem at all. The plotting was as ever fiendish and Billingham writes like a well-modulated dream. The dialogue crackles, especially the banter between Thorne and Hendricks.

Has Billingham succeeded Rankin as the premier UK crime writer of today or is that Val McDermid? It's a close one and I fancy it boils down to how quickly Rankin dumps the increasingly tedious Malcolm Fox and fully revivifies Rebus.

The Deepest Grave - Harry Bingham

After reading The Dead House last month, and encountering DS Fiona Griffiths for the first time, I had to have more. Luckily, I found the latest in the series straightaway.

The Deepest Grave starts with the ritual slaying of a Welsh archaeologist. Fiona soon finds herself enmeshed in the weird and not-so-wonderful world of faked antiquities and Arthurian nutjobs. There is a conspiracy afoot; like all conspiracies it is fundamentally silly to everyone on the outside but that doesn't prevent it from doing serious damage to those who stumble where they shouldn't.


There is even more action than there was in The Dead House, with serious jeopardy for Fiona and those she cares about. The climax is downright bloody brilliant, with Fiona's shady but passionate father stepping up to the plate.


In fact the only downside to The Deepest Grave is a totally unnecessary what-happened-next final chapter. Who cares what happens next? Tell us anything we need to know in the next book. If it doesn't add anything to the next instalment it doesn't matter.


But let's be clear, Harry Bingham is as good as it gets in contemporary British crime fiction and I am a confirmed fan.

The Dead House - Harry Bingham

Harry Bingham is one of those relatively new crime writers I've seen reviewed and wondered about reading. I have to admit that what put me off was the female lead. Not that I have anything against women detectives - but few male authors can really do great things with them; even as a male reader I get the feeling there is always something missing.

Good news - Harry Bingham is an exception to that rule of thumb. DS Fiona Griffiths is a fabulous series character. Yes, there remains something missing but that is expressly the point. The entirety of her life before adoption is missing. The people who adopted her, who love her and whom she loves in return, have dubious connections. There is a massive backstory hanging over this, the fifth in the series, which - brilliantly - Bingham refers to but does not expound upon. He is playing the long game and we, as readers, are happy to trust him to reveal it when the time comes.


The setting is Wales - big city Wales (Cardiff) where Fiona is based, and the remote village of Ystradfflur, the valley of flowers, where she finds her crime scene. As Bingham puts it---

Deep Wales. Real Wales,

This is the Wales that pre-existed the Romans, that will outlast our foolish time on earth, our crawl across the face of this dark planet.

 In Ystradfflur is a Dead House, the place by the chapel where poor Victorian villagers could lay out their loved one for visits prior to burial. There lies a young blonde woman in a white dress ringed by candles. She has had high quality plastic surgery but hasn't shaved her legs recently. Fiona notices this because she spends the night with the corpse, who she decides to call Carlotta. She communes. She holds hands. And we start to realise just how strange and damaged Fiona really is.



The supporting characters are equally well drawn - vivid where they need to be, prosaic when their main purpose is the highlight the flaws in Fiona. The plotting is multi-layered and complex. The denouement is hinted at throughout but I certainly did not see it coming. I have read a lot of books in my life, averaging at least two a week over half a century and I have never ever seen that ploy used. Yet it works brilliantly. There is real danger for Fiona, real tension for us, both there and in the caving sequence and in her interaction with Len Roberts, the failed smallholding hill farmer who has gone primitive and who is suspected of dark deeds.



The best British crime novel I've read this year. Highly recommended.