FIVE CRIME FICTION MINI-REVIEWS

Bookman Beattie reviewed the following titles in the Sunday Star Times yesterday.

AN EXPERT IN MURDER - Death haunts the West End
Nicola Upson – Faber - $37.99

Back in the 60’s I remember reading several crime novels by Josephine Tey. They were Penguin paperbacks; one I particularly recall was The Daughter of Time which featured her usual protagonist Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant.

So imagine my surprise when I came to read An Expert in Murder, published in April 2008, to find it started as follows:

Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realized the odds were against her when she found that her train, the early morning express from the Highlands , was running an hour and a half late….In fact, although this was the day of the first murder, nothing would disturb her paece of mind until the following morning.

Thus Nicola Upson in her impressive debut novel creates a protagonist whose name is already known to afficianados of crime fiction. Clever stuff. In fact Josephine Tey, the author, was a pseudonym anyway, for Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952), a Scottish author who was also a playwright for which work she had a further pseudonym. At the end of the novel I read the Author’s Note in which she states that her book is “a work of fiction, inspired by real lives and events”. She goes on to say that Elizabeth Mackintosh had made a name for herself with her play Richard of Bordeaux which took more than 100,000 pounds at the box office during its 463 performances at the New Theatre (now the Noel Coward Theatre. That must have been a most significant sum back then.

In this new book Josephine Tey is a successful playwright who is on her way to London to see Richard of Bordeaux, “her own play and now London’s longest run about to enter its final week”. It is 1934. On the train she meets a young fan, Elspeth, who is also heading to London to see the play. Shortly after the train’s arrival at King’s Cross station Elspeth is cruelly murdered and so the mystery begins.

The novel is set in and around the London theatre district and is a very fine piece of writing in the Agatha Christie style with a murder very early on, another follows, and any number of suspects. Her character development is excellent, in particular I found Josephine Tey and Detective Inspector Archie Penrose well drawn, and she captures the period wonderfully well providing an atmospheric snapshot of London at that time. Upson can really write and I predict a bright career ahead as a crime/mystery writer if she can produce more like this.

T IS FOR TRESPASS
Sue Grafton – Macmillan – $38

Sue Grafton’s first title featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone was A if for Alibi published in 1983, B is for Burglar followed in 1985 and now she has progressed through to T is for Trespass. Slightly worrying to her legion of fans (include me among them) is the question of what is going to happen when she finally reaches Z? That is several years away yet and in the meantime we can hopefully look forward to another six titles in this alphabetical sequence.

First a word about Kinsey Millhone. She was born in 1950 but at the age of five her parents were killed in an horrific car accident. She survived but even today the trauma of that day remains with her. After college she became a police officer but had trouble dealing with the bureaucracy and the attitude to women officers so after two years she quit. She then joined a detective agency for a couple of years before branching out on her own when in her late twenties. She has had two brief marriages, lives alone in her studio apartment in her hometown of Santa Teresa, California. T for Trespass is set in 1987 so Kinsey is now 37.
Not a lot has changed in her life since we first met her, she jogs each morning to offset the cheese burgers she is addicted to, she still lives alongside her lovable octogenarian landlord Henry and she is still attracting strange criminal cases.

This new novel though is quite unsettling with a really creepy villain in the form of an evil 50’s something sociopath named Solana Rojas who is a specialist aged care nurse with an obsessive, half-witted son who has assaulted several women. Solan Rojas is not her real name but rather an identity she has stolen to give her access to private care giving jobs to the defenseless elderly.
The story starts quietly enough with Kinsey taking care of routine matters, attending to a grumpy neighbor and other mundane tasks.
At the same time we are being introduced to the loathsome Solana and wondering when their paths will cross.
We don’t have to wait too long because following the fall of grumpy neighbor Gus his niece is unwilling to fly in from New York for a few days to care for him so Solana is hired as live-in help.
Kinsey and Henry feel from the start that there is something most odd about Solana but they are both rather preoccupied on other matters and it is almost too late by the time they note Gus’s worrying decline.
Vintage Grafton, but not recommended for elderly readers living alone.

DYING TO SIN - Stephen Booth - Harper Collins - $35.99

Booth is a former journalist who has been a fulltime writer since 2000 when his debut crime novel BLACK DOG was published featuring young Derbyshire police detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. These two are together again in Booth’s latest, his eighth, although Fry is now a Detective Sergeant while Cooper remains a Detective Constable. Their relationship is not an easy one.
Jamie Ward has a student job working for a property developer on Pity Wood Farm an isolated property in the Peak District. It is dirty, physically demanding and boring work but all that changes when he uncovers a human hand. The resultant police search uncovers two bodies that have both been there for some considerable while. The ultimate cold case. And it is some way into the book before the bodies are indetified.
It proves that the farm has long been a source if employment for poor workers passing through the district and it would appear that some have experienced a fate worse than poverty.
Although the story is tense, and occasionally terrifying, I found it somewhat slow moving with rather too much about farming and village life.

BLOOD SUNSET – Jarad Henry – Allen & Unwin $35

Here is a writer remarkably qualified to write crime fiction/ He has a degree in criminology, has over 10 years experience in the criminal justice system and is currently a strategic adviser for Victoria Police.
Blood Sunset is his second novel featuring the physically and emotionally scarred Detective Rubens McCauley whom we met in his debut novel, Head Shot.
This new title opens with McCauley being called to an apparent drug overdose at the back of a café in the Melbourne suburb of St.Kilda. Initially the police decide it is a case of accidental death but something doesn’t quite add up for our cop and after a restless night he decides that the death is not accidental after all so he revives the case and soon finds himself up against a bunch of paedophiles, drug dealers and juvenile hookers. This doesn’t go down well with his superior and soon he is taken off the case but the case has become intensely personal for McCauley and he battles on.
Written with a pace and dialogue that reminded me of Elmore Leonard but set in a familiar location. It is high summer and Melbourne swelters in the heat and smoke from raging bushfires hence the title I guess.
This is gripping crime fiction with a sufficiently complex plot to keep the reader’s attention.Solid too at 300+ pages. I was impressed.

OPEN FILE – Peter Corris – Allen & Unwin $25

Another Australian novel but this time set in Sydney and from an author regarded as the godfather of Australian crime fiction. Peter Corris has been writing for many years, indeed as far as I ca make out this new title is his 30th in the Cliff Hardy series. Hardy is a Sydney-based private detective who has a legion of Aussie fans although I am not sure how widely read he is on this side of the Tasman. It looks like Corris may be preparing Hardy for retirement as when the story opens our protagonist informs us his “private enquiry agent licence was cancelled, my appeal having been rejected with a clear indication that the ban was for life”.
He has found a handyman friend to sit in his Glebe house and he is off to the States and Europe to drink with friends.
While he is busy closing up his office though he comes across an old box file with the words “Hampshire Open” and 1988 scrawled on it – “reluctantly I took the folder out of the box, slapped it on the desk and looked at it……………..”
The story then is about this case which had never really been solved and it takes the reader back to a time when Hardy was in his prime and Sydney was a much tougher place than today.
Good reliable stuff, entertaining, well-written as always, and of course Cliff Hardy is such a likeable, no-airs-and-graces type of decent Aussie battler that it comes as no surprise that this series continues to sell in great numbers.