Crime fiction may seem an odd choice for the two weeks of the year that we
spend in the bosom of our families, relaxing and enjoying ourselves. But the
truth is that reading about murder might be the thing that keeps our hands
away from the throats of our spouses and children.
There’s precedent. In Norway, families traditionally celebrate Easter with a
mass exodus to the fjords and the mountains, where they cram into tiny
cottages with their nearest and dearest. To divert them from the murderous
feelings generated by living at such close quarters, they traditionally read
murder mysteries and thrillers. Nobody, apparently, dies as a result.
And it’s amazing how many crime novels do genuinely lift the spirits,
especially series novels, where we pick up on our favourite characters’
latest travails. It can be just like catching up with old friends — the ones
you always go on holiday with . . .
Take Reginald Hill. He’s been delighting readers with his Dalziel and Pascoe
novels for a staggering 39 years yet the latest offering, Midnight Fugue
(HarperCollins, £17.99 £14.39: Buy
this book), is fresh and memorable. Dalziel, struggling to get back into
his stride after serious injury, is confronted by a woman whose supposedly
dead husband appears to have resurfaced on the fat cop’s patch. Police
corruption, the underbelly of politics and personal revenge drive a complex
story packed into 24 hours. It’s a witty, wise and warm read, with rich
characterisation and emotional depth.
Like Andy Dalziel, Inspector Salvatore Montalbano is a man of powerful
appetites. It’s impossible to read Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian-based novels
without salivating. His descriptions of Montalbano’s meals are the perfect
appetiser for those gourmet moments we all dream of on holiday. Camilleri’s
books are humane and entertaining, even when they stray into sinister
territory. His latest paperback, The Paper Moon (Picador, £7.99: Buy
this book), has a cold, twisted tale of love and exploitation at its
heart, but Montalbano and his team are the perfect counterweight to its
darkness.
The brio that Kate Atkinson brought to her earlier literary fiction also
suffuses her crime novels. The adventures of the unorthodox private eye
Jackson Brodie are rooted in the emotional betrayals that shake lives to
their foundations, but a twisted strand of optimism worms its way through
her convoluted plots. His third outing, When Will There be Good News? (Black
Swan, £7.99: Buy
this book), is impossible to read without rooting for the oddball
teenager Reggie, the self-destructive cop Louise, and Jackson himself. The
plotlines come thick and fast, the overlaps surprising and the coincidences
mostly turn out to be, as Atkinson says, “explanations waiting to happen”.
The great tradition of English eccentricity has many flag-bearers in the
mystery field, with Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May series
prominent among the current crop. His octogenarian sleuths and their
Peculiar Crimes Unit specialise in cases that allow Fowler to explore arcane
aspects of London’s landscape and history, from its hidden underground
rivers to its pubs. Using the devices of the classic English mystery, The
Victoria Vanishes (Bantam, £7.99: Buy
this book) owes a debt to Edmund Crispin’s classic The Moving Toyshop
(Vintage, £7.99 £7.59) — Fowler writes devilishly clever and mordantly funny
novels that are sometimes heartbreakingly moving.
The poet Sophie Hannah’s recent emergence as a bestselling thriller writer has
revealed another quirky imagination at play. The Other Half Lives (Hodder,
£12.99: Buy
this book) has a corkscrew plot that performs a danse macabre
around the passions and rivalries of artists. But it’s rescued from the risk
of pretentiousness by the bizarre emotional lives of the police officers
charged with investigating its crimes. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk,
but Hannah does it triumphantly, maintaining the tension to the very end. If
the League of Gentlemen investigated crime, it might bear a passing
resemblance to this.
There’s not much quirkiness or humour in most of the Scandinavian writers who
have been making their mark recently in translation. To escape the
unremitting bleakness, try Hakan Nesser’s intriguing Inspector Van Veeteren
series. It’s set in a fictional country that seems to overlap Flanders and
the Netherlands. Woman with Birthmark (Macmillan, £16.99: Buy
this book) centres on the mysterious doorstep shootings of local men.
Two shots to the chest and two below the belt are the hallmark of a killer
whose motives lie buried deep in the past. Van Veeteren is a thinker, a man
who pushes his team to reflect laterally about crime and its motives.
Thoughtful and sometimes wry, Nesser displays more optimism in his social
commentary than do most of his fellow Nordic writers.
If it has taken us a while to catch on to the quality crime fiction coming out
of Scandinavia, it’s taken the Irish even longer to get the hang of writing
it. Until Ken Bruen, Jim Lusby and Julie Parsons emerged in recent years,
there was almost no Irish crime writing to speak of. But a new generation of
writers has grabbed the idea of using the genre to write about the new
Ireland. One of the best is the playwright Declan Hughes, whose private eye
Ed Loy brings a Chandlerian world-weariness to contemporary Dublin. Loy has
lived in exile in the US, so he brings the stereoscopic vision of the native
and the new boy to a country determined to build the Emerald City on its
impoverished past. All the Dead Voices (John Murray, £16.99: Buy
this book) has the authority of a writer who has found his stride: it’s
energetic, pacy and vivid. Loy is hired to look into a cold case and soon
finds himself tangled in the complicated past lives of former republicans
who don’t want the past to disturb their newfound respectability. Not a
shamrock in sight.
Over the past dozen years the Scots have colonised the crime field with a
particular brand of dark psychological investigation shot through with the
blackest of humour. One of the latest exponents is Caro Ramsay, whose second
outing for her team of Partickhill cops, Singing to the Dead (Penguin,
£6.99: Buy
this book), picks up the threads of her dramatic debut. It’s Christmas,
and two young boys from deprived backgrounds are missing. The ante is upped
when a third boy, the son of one of the cops, also disappears. Throw into
the mix the triumphant return of a homegrown rock star with a dubious past
and a product-tampering killer and the scene is set for more drama.
Well-drawn characters and a great sense of place set this head and shoulders
above most of the competition.
One of the reasons crime fiction thrives is its ability to keep reinventing
itself. Dissatisfied with the traditional idea of a serial character,
Michael Robotham has hit on the clever idea of a group of characters who
take it in turn to hold centre stage in his novels. So, a minor character in
one novel will become the protagonist in another, then disappear into the
wings for the next. Each book colours in a different part of the picture.
Shatter (Doubleday, £6.99: Buy
this book), the fourth in the “series”, foregrounds the psychologist Joe
O’Loughlin, brought in to find a reason for apparently inexplicable
suicides. Gradually it becomes clear that someone is persuading the victims
to die and Joe has to figure out who and why. It sounds like a conventional
set-up, but Robotham’s skills in characterisation and suspense make this a
haunting read that niggles in the mind for a long time.
John le Carré’s masterful command of storytelling has encompassed series and
standalone novels, creating sophisticated narratives where moral questions
are as vital as suspense. His latest, A Most Wanted Man (Hodder, £7.99: Buy
this book), is set in the cosmopolitan city of Hamburg, where a grim and
shameful history provides the intersection between a devout young Muslim
refugee and a British banker. A principled human rights lawyer is the meat
in the sandwich and the story unrolls with a terrible and heartbreaking
inevitability. Le Carré remains a writer who can move us to tears. And
with Radio 4 embarked on dramatising all the George Smiley series, this is
as good a time as any to go right back to the beginning of le Carré’s output
with A Call for the Dead.
My final tip is a debut to watch out for at the airport. Out at the start of
August, Liam McIlvanney’s All the Colours of the Town (Faber, £12.99: Buy
this book) is a gripping read. A Glasgow journalist investigates a story
that takes him into the murky heart of the Troubles in Belfast and beyond.
Tough and uncompromising, beautifully written.
And if you’ve a taste for revisiting a classic, try Josephine Tey’s The
Franchise Affair (Arrow, £7.99 Buy
this book), a bewildering, devious tale of how lies devour lives. It
tells the story of an elderly mother and daughter whose reputations and
liberty are held hostage by the accusations of a young woman. Sarah Waters
has admitted that this played a part in inspiring her brilliant and
unsettling new novel The Little Stranger (Virago, £16.99: Buy
this book). That’s not surprising — most of Tey’s novels still have the
power to disturb us today.
With luck, there’s enough murder here to sublimate your darkest urges towards
your holiday companions . . .
