There are spirited talking points connected with the parallel lives of the writer J. K. Rowling. Under her real name, she is the creator of the all-conquering Harry Potter franchise, but she has latterly enjoyed considerable acclaim for her crime novels written as Robert Galbraith. As Rowling, the writer has become a fearless (and controversial) advocate for women’s rights in the trans debate, but as Galbraith, the points of dissension are more literary: however popular her novels featuring the detective Cormoran Strike are, are they obliged to have such a prodigious number of pages? Well, on the strength of her latest, The Hallmarked Man (Little, Brown, £30), every one of the 897 pages is justified – this may be Galbraith/Rowling’s most forceful outing yet. When the dismembered body of a man police believe to be an armed criminal is discovered in the vault of a silver merchant, Strike is hired by Decima Mullins to discover if the body is that of the missing father of her newborn baby. The shop in question is beside Freemasons’ Hall – its speciality is Masonic items – and a variety of possibilities as to the identity of the body begin to present themselves. A complex narrative (with superscriptions quoting Housman and Browning) is further complicated by Strike’s conflicted desire to declare his love for his agency partner Robin. As usual, the personal and the professional are expertly juggled in a novel that maintains the irresistible trajectory of this series, intimidating page count notwithstanding.
The Icelandic crime writer Ragnar Jónasson had a canny strategy for breaking into the non-Scandinavian market: before a word of his had been translated into English, he became a familiar face on the British crime-writing scene. This strategy engendered considerable anticipation: what would his books actually be like? The answer, of course, is that he is a considerable talent, with such novels as Snowblind gleaning acclaim. The jokey title of his latest, The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer (Michael Joseph, £20, translated by Victoria Cribb), actually wrongfoots the reader: despite the plethora of classic crime fiction tropes, the central mystery is not at all cosy – it’s as dark and threatening, in fact, as anything in the Nordic noir genre. In Reykjavik, best-selling crime writer Elín S. Jónsdóttir has disappeared. Tracking her down, youthful detective Helgi discovers that the missing writer’s story is a classic case of Winston Churchill’s ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ – Jónsdóttir’s past turns out to be strange indeed.
The Isles of Scilly, lashed by winter storms, are the setting for Deadman’s Pool by the gifted Kate Rhodes (Orenda, £9.99). DI Ben Kitto escorts a priest who has opted to live in an ancient church on an uninhabited island – but the decomposed remains of a young woman are found, and, as the storm rages, a ruthless killer is hiding in plain sight. No one produces more elegantly written work than Rhodes (who is also a poet), and any further recommendation for her work is redundant.
A British writer working at the coalface of crime fiction for decades is Mike Ripley, most recently breathing new life into Margery Allingham’s sleuth Albert Campion in the detective’s sunset years. Buried Above Ground (Severn House, £21.99) is a piquantly metafictional departure, announced as a ‘novel about writing crime novels’. The target of satire here is British classic crime (on which the talented Mr Ripley is an expert) with a quest to obtain the rights to a forgotten author’s backlist proving to have deadly consequences. Five unreliable narrators and Ripley’s trademark wit ensure that the reader will not look at classic crime in quite the same way again.
Writers who earn their crust solely by writing tend to resent interlopers from other professions, and the actor Richard Armitage might have expected some unfriendly badinage when he took up the crime fiction cudgels. But his debut Geneva gleaned praise, and The Cut (Faber, £18.99) bids fair to replicate that success. The village of Barton Mallett is destabilised when a murder from decades ago is linked to a film being made in the present – with menacing results. A dual timeline is nicely orchestrated by Armitage, though some may feel his scene-setting is a tad leisurely.
The human race wakes every morning with a new worry, and among the host of such anxieties at present is artificial intelligence. Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability (Europa, £14.99) functions efficiently on a variety of levels as family drama, thriller and a sober examination of what current technological developments hold for us.
Finally, intriguing work from the Far East. The writer Seishi Yokomizo has been described as ‘the Japanese Agatha Christie’, and Murder at the Black Cat Café (Pushkin Vertigo, £10.99, containing two novellas newly translated by Bryan Karetnyk) is an entertaining (if undemanding) divertissement from 1973.
Barry Forshaw is the author of ‘Brit Noir’
