The Long Drop - Denise Mina

 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

Every Dead Thing - John Connolly

 Every Dead Thing  (1999) is the first Charlie Parker thriller and Connolly's first book.  Parker is a former NYPD detective who let the job get to him.  He took to drink and neglected his wife and daughter.  Then, one night, he staggered home to find his wife and daughter monstrously butchered.

Two years on, having left the force, Parker is completely sober and 100% forcused on capturing the killer.  He contacts his old partner and gets an informal gig hunting for a missing woman.  This leads him to a philanthropist widow, a local mobster, and the person responsible for a chain of serial murders - but not his serial murders.  So Parker moves on to New Orleans and hooks up with FBI contacts and local NOPD in another chain of murders.

The problem, ostensibly, is that Every Dead Thing is actually two novels, one set and solved in New York, the other likewise in New Orleans.  Even more problematic, they are in many ways the same novel done twice - mob links, serial killers, Parker allowed more access to police and FBI than would ever be allowed.  It is also very long.  And yet, for all that, it works.  It works very well indeed.  The overarching story of Parker's quest links the two main storylines sufficiently to keep us going.  The characters, especially Parker, are deeply drawn and engaging.  The narrative tone - first person Parker - is pitch perfect.  He is never a man in control, always a man in recovery.  Side characters, the New York killer couple Angel and Louis, the voodoo momma in deepest Louisiana, even the mobsters and their lead assassins, draw us in.  I didn't work out who the killer was in either North or South, and especially not both, which is always a good thing.

There are now twenty Parker novels.  I enjoyed Connolly's non-Parker novel He (see review below) so much that I decided to try Parker and now I'm hooked.

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.

A Casebook of Murder - Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson's reputation seems to have faded slightly since his death in 2013. In life he always seemed to be putting out a new book or giving his take on some arcane subject in the press or on TV. Once, of course, he was very famous indeed, not only an original angry young man but one whose debut book The Outsider sought to create a new philosophy for the era of angst. Now, though, he is very much out of fashion. His vast works on the occult are passé, whereas back in the Seventies they held pride of place on any reputable bookshelf. The same goes - with knobs on - for his many volumes on murderers, of which this (from 1969) was an early example.

The problem here is not the concept, though Wilson's preoccupation with sex sits less comfortably now than it did back in the day/ It is the fact that hundreds of lesser lights have attempted similar compilations and lowered the tone. They cobble together cheap cash-ins, whereas Wilson is absolutely serious in intent. That may be another problem. He does tend to make declamatory assumptions which are easily refuted. I tend to think he can forgiven the odd gaff, given that he was ploughing such a lone furrow.

The overarching idea here is that different eras get different kinds of killer. He starts with the late medieval period, then the time of Sheppard and Wild. The 19th century, in which the western world passed from rural villages to sprawling industrial cities and, finally, to the dawn of scientific criminology, warrants four chapters. We end, of course, with two-thirds of the 20th century. When Wilson signed off his book the Moors Murderers were beginning their life sentences and Mary Bell, the Newcastle child killer of children (whom I had remembered as Glaswegian for some reason) was still on trial.

There are many fascinating ideas here but too much is recycled from Wilson's earlier Encyclopedia of Murder (1961 - co-written with Patricia Pitman) or cobbled together from inherently unreliable newspaper reports. Wilson would go on to recycle lots of it many more times over his remaining forty years. That said, there is one reason for Wilson always standing at the head of his field. His Ritual in the Dark (1960) is the best novel ever written about a serial killer and by a distance the most terrifying.

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

I first found Erik Larson when I acquired his book about Crippen and Marconi, Thunderstruck, reviewed here in February 2016. In that review I alluded to this book, which likewise combines the US serial killer H H Holmes with the building of the Chicago World's Fair, which effectively supplied him with victims during the summer of 1893.

The idea, on first glance, seems terrific, but like Thunderstruck there are problems. In Thunderstruck it was the fact that not only did Crippen and Marconi never meet, they were rarely in the same country. Marconi did not invent wireless telegraphy in order to catch Crippen, it just happened that his invention was used in Crippen's capture. Also, the point of interest with Crippen is that he was such a meek man, the worm who literally turned on his appalling wife. No one can accuse H H Holmes of similar shortcomings. He was the ultimate predator, killing for the simple pleasure of being there at the death. Then there is his purpose-built hotel of horror, with its built-in gas chambers and chutes to the basement for easy disposal. On the other hand Marconi was always interesting in everything he did, whereas Daniel Burnham was only one of many architects who worked on the World's Fair, albeit he was the team leader. His partner John Root was the visionary behind the scheme but died before work began. Far more interesting than Burnham are the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead, driven mad by overwhelming toothache, and the mercurial George Ferris who came up with the awesome wheel which saved the fair's financial bacon and was probably the single defining legacy of the show.


The main problem, however, is that the six months of the fair was only part of Holmes's murderous career. In a sense it was a deviation from his usual practice, which was to kill wives, mistresses and business partners for their life insurance. Too little is known of Holmes for him to be anything other than an enigma. He was not caught until more than a year after the fair ended and during a long time in prison he wrote his own story for money - three 'confessions', each more appalling than the last. How much, if any, was true? How many did he really kill? We will never know. One mystery that sticks with me is who did he leave the money to? Tracing his heirs, several of whom he had almost certainly killed and others who probably were not as legally entitled as they assumed, would be a real tangle to unravel.


Larson's research is again hugely impressive. I love his declaration that "I do not employ researchers, nor do I conduct any primary research using the Internet. I need physical contact with my sources, and there's only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story." You and me both, Erik - not that I could afford to use researchers even if I wanted to. And he writes like a dream, always pitch-perfect, never remotely dull. I will certainly snap up the next book of his I come across. I quite fancy Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania.

Standing in Another Man's Grave - Ian Rankin

This, apparently, is Rebus #18 and Fox #3, which handily also reflects their respective contributions to this story. It's a great idea to bring the two police protagonists together but it doesn't really work because Fox of Complaints only serves to tell us what we already know - that Rebus, now retired and working for Cold Cases, is a bit of a maverick.

The idea of setting Rebus's return in Cold Cases, on the other hand, works well. Every professional relationship we have followed through the preceding 19 novels is now reversed - Siobhan Clarke, formerly his oppo, is now his direct superior; Ger Cafferty, notorious gangland kingpin, is now also officially retired and Rebus's occasional, awkward, drinking buddy. Otherwise, the things which defined Rebus are thankfully much the same: nothing in his life except policework; the drive always to make things harder for himself than they need to be.

Forget the Malcolm Fox stuff, which is either a failed gimmick or (as I prefer to believe) a necessary device to frame Rebus's potential return to the force; this is essentially old school Rebus. Perhaps I should amend that slightly. Standing in Another Man's Grave is Rebus after he became fully grown from around the fifth novel in the sequence, when he gradually transitioned from detective to flawed hero.

The story is a good one. Rebus is able to link a missing young woman to a series of previous disappearances which convince the inquiry team there is a serial killer on the loose. Thus Rebus is seconded to the main inquiry, reunited with Clarke, and all is business as usual. There is a good running joke about the ambitious DCI being called James Page (i.e. Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin legend). We have the usual conflict between traditional hands-on policing and modern micro-managed policing-by-computer. Rebus mixes with the Edinburgh underworld in all its glory.

The midpoint twist I expect we would all see coming - I certainly did for once in my reading life - and the ultimate solution is neither here nor there. Somebody had to do it, it has to be Rebus who finds him, no one of course believes Rebus and Clarke has to be equivocal. That is what we want from a Rebus novel. That is what we get. In this instance we also get Rankin at the height of his powers. It's a long novel, 350 pages, but Rankin is able to fill it with character and complexity.

The Psalm Killer - Chris Petit

It's surprising, when you think about it -that the thirty-year 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland haven't spawned their own genre. I mean, the premise has everything - ancient blood feuds, dark deeds in ordinary streets, corruption and double-dealing on a truly epic scale. Perhaps it is still too soon. Perhaps so little of the truth is out there in the public domain that building a fiction on what little we do know seems like a hostage to fortune.
None of this, clearly, deterred Chris Petit, film maker (e.g. the cult Radio On) and occasional crime novelist. Psalm Killer came out in 1996, a year before the Northern Ireland Agreement, and is set mainly a decade earlier with flashbacks to ten years before that. It therefore covers most of the period.

The protagonist is Inspector Cross of the RUC, an Englishman married into the Ulster squirearchy. Petit thus deals with the key obstacle in writing about the Troubles - which side is right and who is the good guy. Cross is an outsider, even to the RUC. His marriage is failing and he has always been a disappointment to the in-laws. He has no real opinions about the situation.  He checks under his car for bombs every morning before leaving for the office. He investigates murders.

Our antagonist, the titular Psalm Killer, is also English, an emotionally crippled soldier who volunteered to serve deep undercover in Northern Ireland. Known only by his codename Candlestick, he first infiltrates the loyalist paramilitaries, then switches to the Republicans. He disappears, ostensibly killed, only to surface again in the mid-Eighties. Unlike Cross, Candlestick does have opinions. He is apparently killing people to draw attention to his beliefs.

This brings us to Petit's central theme, which is the corruption, institutional, moral, political, that kept the Troubles going so long that by 1995 peace seemed to be in nobody's interest. Petit has done tons of research - he provides a long bibliography with useful pointers to what the main sources discuss - and he deploys his discoveries by showing rather than telling. The problem, though, is that to show so much corruption in all its multifaceted glory requires a book of considerable length. At 635 pages in paperback, The Psalm Killer is simply too long, the story so complex that by the time of the final twist - which is a good one - I could no longer remember who the surprise person was.

So, Psalm Killer has its flaws, but there is so much quality here, so much information that no one else has revealed so effectively, that it is well worth seeking out. Petit writes well. He takes the trouble to give his characters back stories and Achilles' heels that go beyond the norm. It is a fine example of a genre that should exist but doesn't. In that sense it not only defines the genre, you could say it is the genre.

I am keen to read more. Robinson, Petit's first novel from 1993, sounds like my cup of tea,

Sawbones - Stuart MacBride

A very short book which today would be an ebook but which back in 2008 was that rarest of publishing birds, the stand-alone novella.  Just 114 pages - and that only by virtue of many chapters and only 40 characters a line - Sawbones is off the beaten track for MacBride, a serial killer story set in Iowa with a couple of extra-violent hoodlums as our heroes.  It romps merrily along - MacBride can do pitch-black crime on either side of the Atlantic - and comes to a suitably grisly end.

Well done http://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/ for publishing novellas in the first place.  Extra congratulations for being a publishing house dedicated to books designed for children and adults who have difficulty reading.