Jake Kerridge surveys the latest crop of historical crime novels, which range from Roman times to wartime Berlin.
Ancient murder Photo: © The Art Archive /
Alamy
The Telegraph - 17 Apr 2013
Lindsey Davis has written so extensively on the Roman Empire that she makes
Edward Gibbon look reticent on the subject. One forgets, now that she has
produced 20 novels about the informer Marcus Didius Falco, how original the idea
was when she started out in the Eighties. Roman sleuths are ten-a-denarius now,
but Davis was primus and still has no pares.
Her latest novel, The Ides of April (Hodder &
Stoughton, £16.99), kicks off a new series set during the reign of the despotic
Domitian, and stars Falco’s adopted daughter Flavia Albia (rescued as a child
from “Londinium, that ramshackle shanty town at the mist-covered end of the
world”), now grown up and a private eye herself. If Flavia’s lengthy, ironical
disquisitions on Roman life are pretty indistinguishable from those her father
so often indulged in, that is all to the good. The auguries promise a long,
successful series.
Andrew Taylor, like Davis, has been quietly producing superb historical
fiction since long before Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker wins bestowed literary
respectability on the genre.
A confident traveller in many different centuries and locales, in
The Scent of Death (HarperCollins, £14.99) he tackles
the (as one character says, “strange and unnecessary”) American War of
Independence. We are in the cowed and devastated New York of 1778, where
somebody is getting away with murder safe in the knowledge that the official
response to any crime is to lynch the nearest slave.
Taylor’s account of the investigatory and amatory exploits of the English
civil servant Edward Savill is solid and authentic-seeming, his dialogue
convincing rather than sparkling. He is not an author with a distinctive voice
but has the first-rate historian’s ability to channel the spirit of his period
and let it speak for itself, combined with a masterly command of plotting and
pace. His hair’s-breadth-escape set pieces are superb.
Lynn Shepherd, the author of A Treacherous Likeness
(Corsair, £17.99), is something of an anti-Taylor, in that she repeatedly makes
her presence felt in her text with such authorial asides as “The Victorians have
no word for ‘groupie’, but Charles is in the presence of one all the same”, or a
reference to “the establishment of Messrs W H Smith & Son (a name you
perhaps recognise).” This may sound arch, but, as a way of deconstructing the
historical novelist’s incongruous dual roles as creator and commentator, it is
witty and economical.
The novel is concerned with rum goings-on in the Shelley-Byron circle, and uses a mystery plot to fill in some of the lacunae of their life stories, with what I thought was remarkable ingenuity. Shepherd has been accused of traducing Mary Shelley, but a calumnious novel may be a good one (see Robert Graves’s Wife to Mr Milton), and you will nod with appreciation even if your lip is curled in disapproval.
Philip Kerr’s long series of novels about the German private eye Bernie Gunther have taken his hero from the beginnings of the Weimar Republic to Cuba in the Fifties, but the latest volume, A Man without Breath (Quercus, £18.99), skips back to 1943 and finds him reluctantly working for the German war crimes bureau. “Berliners, like me, for whom black humour was a religious calling” are having to “keep a zip on the lip”, Bernie tells us, but luckily he hoards plenty of conspiratorial Chandleresque quips.
Like Chandler, Kerr is at his funniest when most disgusted. As with Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, humour seems like an affirmation of the human spirit in a world in which inhumanity holds sway, and makes Kerr’s brilliant novels all the more affecting.
The novel is concerned with rum goings-on in the Shelley-Byron circle, and uses a mystery plot to fill in some of the lacunae of their life stories, with what I thought was remarkable ingenuity. Shepherd has been accused of traducing Mary Shelley, but a calumnious novel may be a good one (see Robert Graves’s Wife to Mr Milton), and you will nod with appreciation even if your lip is curled in disapproval.
Philip Kerr’s long series of novels about the German private eye Bernie Gunther have taken his hero from the beginnings of the Weimar Republic to Cuba in the Fifties, but the latest volume, A Man without Breath (Quercus, £18.99), skips back to 1943 and finds him reluctantly working for the German war crimes bureau. “Berliners, like me, for whom black humour was a religious calling” are having to “keep a zip on the lip”, Bernie tells us, but luckily he hoards plenty of conspiratorial Chandleresque quips.
Like Chandler, Kerr is at his funniest when most disgusted. As with Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, humour seems like an affirmation of the human spirit in a world in which inhumanity holds sway, and makes Kerr’s brilliant novels all the more affecting.
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