Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
Serpent’s Tail, £12.99, 427pp Buy the book

Acts of Violence by Ryan David Jahn
Macmillan, £12.99, 237pp Buy the book

Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James
Bodleian Library, £12.99, 60pp Buy the book

Attica Locke — named after the prison where famous riots occurred in 1971 — has, I believe, written the most impressive crime debut I’ve read this year. Set in 1981 in Houston, Texas, Black Water Rising conveys a portrait of a city mad about oil, replete with corruption and violent cops, but not yet ready to treat its black population with decency, let alone equality.

Jay Porter is a black lawyer and former civil rights activist with a tacky, unsuccessful practice. He cannot afford to take his wife anywhere pricey on her birthday and has to settle for a night trip on a dingy boat down the city’s bayou. They hear the sound of a gunshot, then screams; a woman falls in the murky water. Reluctantly, because his wife insists, he jumps in to rescue her. She’s white, rich and silent. His act has frightening consequences, placing him in personal danger and embroiling him in a murder inquiry, a bitter longshoremen’s strike and some of Houston’s more shadowy activities. Porter is a beautifully drawn character and the atmosphere is terrific.

In 1964, a young woman, Kitty Genovese, was murdered near her New York apartment. The killing was seen by many people — estimated at between 12 and 38 — but no one tried to help her, or indeed, until much later, report the event to the police. The apparent indifference of witnesses provoked anguished debate and became the subject of psychiatric studies into what became known as the “bystander effect”. In Acts of Violence, another excellent first-timer, Ryan David Jahn, takes the nub of the real Genovese case and weaves a superb series of fictional stories around it. The victim is Katrina Marino and her long-drawn-out killing is seen or heard by several neighbours. Each witness has his or her reasons for taking no action. Jahn constructs a convincing edifice of doubt, anger, jealously, despair and a host of other emotions leading inexorably to the same conclusion: do nothing. There is no mystery about her assailant’s identity, yet Jahn manages to instil gripping tensions in the assembly of tales that combine to create a shocking lack of neighbourly love and concern.

P.D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction does not pretend to be anything more than a short, amiable, personal appreciation of the genre by someone who has been one of its most accomplished and popular exponents. The title ought to have included the word British; there’s very little on American writers and almost nothing on the Europeans. There’s not much on the novels of the past half-century. These are not criticisms, merely warnings not to expect anything too comprehensive. James scores highly in her analysis of the components of the detective novel, and the reasons for their continuing popularity. She’s particularly interesting about her own methods — she almost always chooses place before characters and plot. It’s good to know she’s optimistic about the future even though, in reality, DNA would solve in two pages mysteries it used to take whole books to unravel.

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