The days of mystery novels full of cardboard characters, red herrings, and the unlikeliest suspect being guilty are well and truly over. Few crimewriters now follow the old Agatha Christie formula, but Laura Wilson shows precisely how archaic they are.
She writes beautifully and her characters are absolutely convincing, whether they are good, bad or mad, and she has no truck with fiddly crossword-puzzle clues. She introduces her main suspect – a man of many names and very little conscience - right at the start of An Empty Death, and most of the suspense lies in what he is going to do next, how much damage he will cause, and whether DI Ted Stratton is going to stop him before something absolutely terrible happens.
Of course in London in 1944, when the novel is set, terrible things are happening all round. In a way, the activities of one peculiar criminal can never match up to the horrors being visited on the bombed, hungry, cold, beleaguered Londoners. Plenty of writers, from popular novelists to academic historians, have tried to recreate that time and place, but I cannot remember a single one who does it better than Wilson. The familiar details – the line drawn around the inside of the bath to ensure that no one uses up more water than he should, the aftermath of bombs in quiet city streets, the shifts to which rationing has reduced everyone – have never been so well used. Reading this novel you can smell the dust, the stale sweat, the watery beer, and the dreary food. And you can admire the resilience of the people who endured it all and absorbed their private tragedies without making a fuss.
You can also share their outrage with the few who broke the rules to make life easier for themselves – and the ones whose selfishness meant they were prepared to kill to preserve their own security.
Among Wilson's many skills is the ability, shown particularly in My Best Friend, to generate sympathy for the least prepossessing of characters. She does it again here. You find yourself drawn into their world, coming to understand how they think and why they act as they do. And you believe precisely what she intends you to believe so that when the twist comes, unexpected but convincing, you are sucker-punched.
NJ Cooper's latest novel, No Escape, is published by Simon & Schuster.
