As the bizarre anomaly of the UK’s capital lacking a major crime fiction festival to match those of its provinces is set to rights with September’s Capital Crime (featuring Ian Rankin, Robert Harris and Lynda La Plante, along with visiting Americans David Baldacci and Don Winslow), the rude health of the genre is confirmed with this month’s batch of criminous entertainments.
Did Tami Hoag, who began her writing career in 1988 with unthreatening romance novels, warn her original readers that she was about to take the plunge into the macabre with blistering crime books? Thomas Harris and The Silence of the Lambs provide the prototype for Hoag’s new literary identity, and The Boy (Trapeze, £8.99) is as blood-drenched as any of her recent work.
Nick Fourcade’s beat is the Bayou Breaux district of Louisiana. After the discovery of a young boy’s mutilated body, Fourcade is told by the boy’s mother that she was awakened by his dying screams, but the detective has his doubts. Was she in fact responsible for the gruesome killing? With the aid of fellow cop Annie Broussard, Fourcade uncovers revelations about the past of the murdered boy’s mother. We’ve seen the relationship depicted here between male and female detectives a hundred times, but there are other virtues present: the vibrant evocation of rural Louisiana — we are given a glossary to cope with the Cajun French occasionally spoken — and a poetic use of language.
Urban rather than natural settings are the stamping ground of Norwegian ex-policeman Jørn Lier Horst. His acclaimed debut novel Key Witness (2004) inaugurated a new career. The Cabin (£13.99, Michael Joseph, translated by Anne Bruce) is the second entry in the Cold Case Quartet, which features the series’ character Chief Inspector William Wisting, and continues Horst’s move away from police procedurals and into heavyweight thriller territory.
The body of a politician, Bernard Clausen, has been found in his cabin on the Norwegian coast surrounded by a fortune in what appears to be stolen money. Wisting learns that Clausen had connections with criminal networks, and uncovers a conspiracy that threatens the country’s political future. Characterisation and locale are pared to the bone: plotting reigns supreme. Fortunately, that’s Horst’s primary skill.
The Canada-based writer Linwood Barclay had a particular success with Fear the Worst, a title that was virtually a mission statement of what readers might expect from his pleasurably unsettling novels. Barclay is adept at placing his characters (and the reader) into quotidian situations that take scarifying turns — which is very much the case with Elevator Pitch (HQ, £20).
Here, New Yorkers are falling to their deaths in elevators that have been rigged into murder traps and journalist Barbara Matheson is charged with finding out if domestic or foreign terrorism is behind the fatalities. Then a murder victim — an elevator technician — is found with his fingertips removed, and Matheson and detectives Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado find themselves closer to a solution. Barclay’s publishers clearly want this book to do for elevators what Psycho did for showers and Jaws did for the ocean, but there is more going on. The plot is crammed with even more narrative twists than Barclay usually serves up. If Elevator Pitch is not, perhaps, vintage Barclay, it is still delivered with considerable acumen.
Attica Locke’s debut Black Water Rising created a literary sensation, and at a stroke she became the most celebrated African-American writer of crime fiction. Although her books are about the black experience in the US, they are universal in scope. Heaven, My Home (Serpent’s Tail, £14.99) has Texas ranger Darren Matthews investigating a murder involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. He is summoned to the town of Jefferson, , where a boy — the son of a Brotherhood member imprisoned for the murder of a black man — has gone missing.
It’s late 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, and the racial situation in the town is incendiary. Can Darren — despite the colour of his skin — get to the bottom of things? Locke’s take on Trump’s sympathetic attitude towards white supremacists is clear but this is no diatribe — the author remains primarily a consummate storyteller.
Finally, three very different novels showing the range of the crime fiction field. The Long Call (Macmillan, £16.99) by Ann Cleeves finds the creator of the novels behind TV adaptations Shetland and Vera coming up with yet another memorable protagonist. Detective Matthew Venn has rejected his strict Evangelical community but finds himself drawn back into this cloistered world for a murder investigation. Splendid stuff, with Cleeves’ characteristic gift for locale (here north Devon).
Vaseem Khan’s Bad Day at the Vulture Club (Mulholland, £16.99) is the fifth in his witty Inspector Chopra series — Mumbai-based divertissements that cannily subvert the “cosy crime” genre — while Blood Song by Johana Gustawsson (Orenda, £8.99, translated by David Warriner) has her sleuths tracking a monstrous killer, transporting us from modern-day fertility clinics in Sweden to the abuses of Spanish orphanages under the brutal rule of General Franco.
Barry Forshaw’s latest book is ‘Historical Noir’
