This month’s selection covers almost all the countries of crime, featuring traditional mystery yarns, cosy sleuthing, hardboiled tales brimming with darkness and more, elaborate literary thrillers, lands of never in which crime illogically manifests itself, legal shenanigans against the busy backdrop of Los Angeles, a tapestry of women’s voices in quite a different version of the City of Angels and much in the way of thrills, twists and sleuthing. Proof if ever it was needed that the crime and mystery genre has something different to offer to every potential reader.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH: Bradford Morrow/THE FORGERS & THE FORGER’S DAUGHTER (Grove Press)
Both exquisite examples of bibliophilic mysteries with a strong literary bent, Bradford Morrow’s duo of novels offer many delights alongside insidious, cunning plots and satisfying psychological developments and powerful family dynamics. The initial volume first appeared in 2014 but only sees the light of day now in the UK, in conjunction with a second novel involving most of the same characters albeit 20 years or so later. Set in the world of book and manuscripts collectors, and featuring a florilege of specialist book lore and literary anecdotes, the novels also strongly recall the murky worlds of Patricia Highsmith with its unreliable characters and ever-obfuscating veils of deception. Will is an accomplished and unrepentant forger of dead authors’ signatures who has fallen in love with Meghan, a bookseller whose own brother Adam is a notorious collector with connections on the dark side of the trade who ends up dead in gory circumstances. Will’s role in the crime is hinted at with many a secret tie to the letters from famous writers he had forged before he was caught and reformed. After a series of traumatic events that take place in upstate New York and Ireland and the jailing of their nemesis, another forger whose motivations are often puzzling, we see Will and Meghan with now two daughters drawn back into the fray when he is blackmailed into forging a first edition of an early Edgar Allen Poe booklet, with his eldest daughter Nicole helping, having inherited his calligraphic talent. Full of wonderful minutiae about first editions, collecting and its quirks, the art of letter-press printing and much in the way of non-bookish thrills, these absolutely unique novels are a quiet delight.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: William Hjortsberg/ANGELS’S INFERNO (No Exit Press)
Hjortsberg’s classic FALLING ANGEL initially appeared in 1978 and many of us had long given up on the prospect of a sequel, to the extent that Alan Parker’s engrossing ANGEL HEART film adaptation featuring Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro strongly overlapped the novel in our imagination, despite its sometimes radical departure in locale from the novel. With the death of the unprolific author in 2017, it was assumed that would be it but, lo, out of the blue a second novel involving harder than nails New York private eye Harry Angel and the demonic Louis Cyphre has finally seen the light of day. Completed shortly before Hjortsberg’s death, it takes off straight after the ending of the initial volume and sees Angel now haunted by the prospect of taking bloody revenge on Cyphre to avenge the ritual deaths he has inflicted upon him, a task that leads him from the darkness of Manhattan to Paris and later the Vatican in a plot in overdrive, overflowing with violence, metaphysical doubt and thrills and a gallery of characters from the shadow world of religion, voodoo and insidious malevolence. With a shocking if logical ending always in prospect, the reader’s heartbeat is given sharp shocks on every page in this sprawling dark thriller (which could have done with an edit or some tightening up which I am sure the author intended). Long-awaited and darker than hell. The devil owns all shades of noir in a sequel we never thought would happen
Christopher Priest/THE EVIDENCE (Gollancz)
Priest’s novels and stories set in his imaginary world of the Dream Archipelago have proved fascinating, constantly questioning the nature of reality and the fabric of storytelling. This new instalment boldly brings the crime genre into his complex universe and the final result is a curious but fond meditation on the art of mystery writing and the rules of detective fiction in all their sometimes contradictory complications as well as a sharply plotted puzzler set in a curious setting fiendishly adapted to the rules of the whodunnit, the whydunnit and the howdunnit in one full all-embracing swoop. Todd Fremde is a writer of police procedurals who is invited to the faraway island of Dearth to give a talk at a university conference. Unaccustomed to travel and something of a curmudgeon, Todd is soon inveigled in the complications of a place where crime supposedly doesn’t exist and a climate so unlike the warmer climes of his own Salay Raba. Accosted by an enigmatic policewoman who insists on telling him about a past case of hers with a string of connections to his own reality and baffled by the mutable nature of time and space in this outpost of the Archipelago, Todd finds himself tangled in a knot of someone else’s making that becomes no easier after his return home. A fascinating curiosity if, at times, weighed down by the functionality of Priest’s style which somehow works better when the fantasy element is more to the fore.
Ivy Pochoda/THESE WOMEN (Faber & Faber)
No book by Ivy Pochoda is ever the same. Her debut THE ART OF DISAPPEARING was a wonderful, lyrical globe-spanning extravaganza, while VISITATION STREET evoked the pathos of Dennis Lehane’s crime books and WONDER VALLEY visited the claustrophobic world of California’s sprawling highways. Her new novel returns sideways to the criminal world with a serial killer tale retold through the eyes of his female victims, those characters in mystery fiction who all too often are just cyphers, bodies in waiting and not given any level of psychological depth, ending up as necessary plot devices. Someone is savagely stalking the streets of South Los Angeles, and his murderous spree is evoked through the voices of Dorian, a middle-aged woman whose life has been felled by the loss of her daughter, Julianna, a dancer, Marella, an artist, Essie, a cop who was recently laid off, and sundry other forlorn characters including a former prostitute, who survived the killer’s attack. The story spans the years from 1999 to 2014 and its sad tapestry is also an elegy to the victims: 13 women who do not deserve to be forgotten the way society has. Softly spoken but also loud in its intensity, this is a moving tale of despair and crime unlike any other. I’m truly eager to see what Pochoda will offer us next.
Michael Connelly/THE LAW OF INNOCENCE (Orion)
Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller has always been one of Michael Connelly’s most interesting characters; his attitude to the law and the system and society somehow so less black and white than his police counterparts, half-brother Harry Bosch or Renee Ballard. As a result he’s always been much more prone to finding himself in trouble as occurs in this new book when, out of the blue, he is pulled over by the police and the body of one of the defence attorney’s former clients is found in the boot of his car. Charged with murder, he elects to defend himself even though he is in jail and has to pull the strings of his varied team from there, including Bosch. Mickey and the reader know he is being framed but the way Connelly so cleverly deconstructs the conspiracy against Haller and details the enquiry in reverse is a wonder to behold and shows him yet again in total control of his craft, every development and twist falling into place with chess-like precision as layer upon layer of premeditation is unpeeled and added to the mix to complicate Mickey’s plight or lighten his judicial load, keeping the reader constantly on tenterhook and captivated, never quite knowing or guessing what the devious author will pull out of his bag of tricks next until his hero inevitably triumphs. No one does it better.
Charles Cumming/BOX 88 (HarperCollins)
The first volume in a possible new series about the making of a British spy, this is a novel that confirms Charles Cumming as a worthy heir to the coveted Le Carre throne. In 1989, Lachlan Kite was recruited straight from boarding school to Box 88, a secretive unit of MI6 and CIA operatives and his first mission to France is connected to Iranian interests in the Lockerbie bombing but reveals a deeper mystery and darkness. In 2020, Kite becomes the target of MI5 who suspect the existence of his organisation, but Iranian intelligence are also on his trail, which presents Lachlan with a terrible dilemma. Both a novel about the education of a young man into a secretive new way of life and a complex but intelligent espionage game of cat and mouse with an abundance of geopolitical implications and revelations that connect directly with what we, the general public, know (or suspect) about the dark world of covert intelligence. ‘Lockie’ Kite is a most believable character, and as he surmounts obstacles and danger, a very appealing one stumbling on occasion and less than perfect in his moral complexity, and this could well be Cumming’s best book to date which bodes well for the forthcoming sequels.
Colin Larkin/COVER ME (Telos)
The iconography of pulp is part and parcel of the attraction of popular fiction. From Sydney Paget’s illustrations in THE STRAND for the original appearances of Sherlock Holmes to Frank Frazetta’s mighty-thighed barbarians and busty, unclad maidens, not forgetting Ed Emshwiller’s surrealist creations for paperback originals and genre magazines of the 60s and onward, these are the indelible images that marked the youth of many of us. The British publishing industry has proven less gaudy what with the graphic austerity of early Penguin designs creating an altogether quieter template, but artists like Reginald Heade and Hank Janson cover art were much less restrained. It was only when the Pan imprint was launched in the 1950s that joyous illustrations were utilised to perfect the commercial appeal of paperbacks, and their colourful covers are still fondly remembered to this day and now avidly collected. This tasty volume revisiting the vintage art of Pan paperbacks between 1950 and 1965 is a treasure for the enthusiast and the perfect gift, offering us some of the most iconic art, with illustrations that are still now closely associated with Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, WW2 action titles, Leslie Charteris, Edgar Wallace, John Creasey and, uncharacteristically, Patricia Highsmith. A veritable and invaluable cornucopia of memories reviving the forgotten art of so many leading British illustrators and an excuse for nostalgia galore.
Elly Griffiths/THE POSTSCRIPT MURDERS (Quercus)
Griffiths, with several series on the go, is becoming increasingly prolific (as I write this review, her next book has already landed on my doorstep) but she never disappoints. This is the second novel featuring DS Harbinder Kaur, and a follow up to THE STRANGER DIARIES. When a 90-year old woman is found dead, only her Ukrainian carer raises the alarm and gathers quirky allies to her quest for the truth which soon attracts Harbinder Kaur to the scene. It turns out that Peggy Smith, the deceased woman, was a murder consultant to a variety of crime writers, finding innovative ways for them to murder characters, which allows Griffiths to provide us with an affectionate if caustic view of the social world of mystery writing, With a variety of narrators and points of view, this is traditional crime as puzzle and stylishly obeys all the unwritten rules of the genre and entertains wildly in the process with a cast of colourful characters and a respect for genre tropes untainted by irony. Old fashioned and supremely assured in its storytelling but truly great fun, this is the book you never thought you’d like until you dip into its savoury pages.
Thomas McMullan/THE LAST GOOD MAN (Bloomsbury)
A quiet dystopia set in the English countryside proves innovative and moving in this impressive debut. Fleeing from an unnamed city which is ever on fire, Duncan Peck reaches a small settlement on Dartmoor where his cousin James Hale is also the law. At first sight, the village is old England in a nutshell, with traditional pubs, butchers, tearooms, fields and cosy cottages much to the fore. But life here is dominated by a large wall on which announcements, denunciations, gripes and dangerous gossip are inscribed, sometimes overnight, and it is Hale’s job to act on it which often has medieval punishment consequences, much to the dismay of Duncan, who will inevitably soon rise up against the quaint but soul-gnawing status quo. Both a fable, with echoes of Cormac McCarthy, Shirley Jackson’s THE LOTTERY and Margaret Atwood and a gripping thriller about responsibility and justice, and the way society has a knack for self-degradation, this proves an effective mystery with a heady atmosphere of menace and existential dread.
Claire McGowan/THE PUSH (Thomas & Mercer)
This gripping domestic thriller intelligently combines Golden Age tropes with an assembly of suspects with hidden motives and sometimes identities, GONE GIRL-like narrative subterfuge and unreliability, alongside traditional sleuthing with DS Alison Hegarty, a police investigator troubled by her own infertility problems drawn to the mysterious death of someone who had fallen from the balcony of a house, where six couples from the same baby group and antenatal clinic had gathered to celebrate with a barbecue before the birth of the expected respective children. So which of the new parents has something to hide? Initially, all of them have motives of some sort and few of them prove sympathetic, muddying the waters even more when the disparate group shatters with deception, animosity of untruths rising to the surface. With a welter of revelations unpeeled on a regular basis and the right ratio of twists, this keeps you on edge throughout.
