While the cosy crime genre may continue to steamroll all before it, the once all-conquering Nordic noir wave has been more fitful of late. Keeping up the flow of the latter, however, are UK writers who favour chillier Nordic climes. Pre-eminent in this cadre is Will Dean, who grew up in the East Midlands but now lives in a Swedish forest. His latest, Ice Town (Hodder, £20), has his heroine Tuva Moodyson, a deaf journalist in a small Swedish town, keen to help in the search for a missing teenager, also deaf, in remote Esseberg. The town is isolated on the other side of a mountain tunnel, and various violent deaths begin to derail the search. Dean’s mastery of his Swedish setting and command of suspense remain unassailable.
Midnight and Blue (Orion, £25) is a demonstration that Scottish Grand Master Ian Rankin still has some aces up his sleeve when it comes to his long-serving copper Rebus. The latter is serving time for attempted murder and becomes involved in a killing on his cell block, although any sleuthing is undertaken with the knowledge that several of his fellow prisoners want him dead. This is as hypnotic a narrative as we’ve had from Rankin; Rebus behind bars has had a galvanising effect on his creator.
More innovation? Look, for example, at the historical crime genre, courtesy of the talented Leonora Nattrass, who made a splash with her debut Black Drop. Her latest, The Bells of Westminster (Viper, £16.99) is set in London in 1774; Susan Bell, daughter of the Dean of Westminster, becomes involved when the Society of Antiquaries petitions to open the tomb of Edward I. Subsequently, one of the antiquaries is brutally murdered and the corpse of the King is stolen. Nattrass’s studies in 18th-century literature and politics are here transmuted into an exhilarating voyage into another era, crammed with persuasive detail.
Deon Meyer, who is not just the finest crime writer in South Africa but one of the best anywhere, juggles labyrinthine plot strands with a mass of local detail and socio-political commentary – crime fiction sporting real texture and intelligence. With his latest, Leo (Hodder, £22), we are back in the company of the author’s protagonists Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido. The duo are in bad odour, demoted and working in a low-ranking police station, when a group of special forces soldiers orchestrates a honeytrap with a seductive wildlife guide. What follows is a multi-million-dollar heist leading to several gruesome deaths. Meyer (who, despite his impeccable English, writes in Afrikaans – the idiomatic translation is by KL Seegers) supplies the usual panoramic canvas of post-apartheid South Africa. Plotting is non-pareil, but it’s the two bloody-minded detectives who grip our attention.
For the 2016 Man Booker Prize shortlist, the arguments were not the usual ‘readable versus inaccessible’ books, but concerned the shocking fact that the list included a crime novel, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project. Needless to say, pearls were clutched and it didn’t win, but Burnet has proved to be a durable talent, and A Case of Matricide (Contraband, £14.99) maintains his upwards trajectory. Georges Gorski is the Chief Inspector of the French town of Saint-Louis, and with a variety of minatory happenings (such as a sinister stranger prowling the streets) Gorski has his hands full. Employing a meta-fictional style, Burnet has us believe that the novel we are reading is something he has translated, originally written by ‘Raymond Brunet’. This final book in a trilogy is a triumph for Burnet; who needs the Man Booker Prize?
British readers are sometimes distracted by the American writer Patricia Cornwell’s various books pushing her much-contested notion that Jack the Ripper was the painter Walter Sickert, but put that theory aside and remember that Cornwell has been one of most reliable of crime fiction practitioners since Postmortem in 1990 introduced forensic anthropologist Kay Scarpetta. Identity Unknown (Sphere £22) has Scarpetta investigating a murder and finding to her horror that the victim is a man she was once in love with – and who seems to have left her a clue. Cornwell on vintage form.
A fresh approach to the over-visited police procedural genre surfaces in The Last Days of Johnny Nunn by Nick Triplow (No Exit, £9.99). A community activist who tried to halt the sale of publicly owned housing to developers is found dead, creating a problem for uncompromising DS Max Lomax. Triplow is the biographer of Ted Lewis (of Get Carter fame), and this is similarly pungent crime writing.
Finally, two British women writers of perception and authority. Sarah Ward’s Death Rites (Canelo, £9.99) has archaeologist Carla James in the sights of a ruthless and methodical killer. It’s pulse-raising fare, as is Beautiful People by Amanda Jennings (HQ, £16.99). A troubled woman elects to reinvent her life with a new lover from a privileged background – until grim consequences ensue. Jennings’ grasp of dark psychology is as firm as ever.
Barry Forshaw is the author of Euro Noir
