Smooth crime-busters…

Ok, the past few weeks have been spent in shameless indulgence; hitting Nero Wolfe books as though they were crack-pipes, mixing in a bunch of old-school noir (Chandler, Hammet and a Jim Thompson I’d never read before), with a side of Lovecraft, just because.

I was starting to think in a time-warpy sense and when I found myself just shy of telling people that my new job involved “measuring the long green for paper peddlers” I realised I should probably read something a bit more recent. Trouble is, when you’re reading classics (and those are all classics, canon bedamned) reading something newer can be problematic. How many current writers are there who produce work (especially in crime fiction) that one can see being read twenty, thirty, fifty years from now?

Not too many. You can probably count them on both hands (being generous, I can count the ones I’m sure of on one).

Go from reading Rex Stout to James Patterson (say) and you’ll be woefully disappointed. I would say go from reading the back of a cereal box to reading James Patterson and you’ll be disappointed, but there are legions who would disagree with me. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked him as an example ; )

Anyroad, we got a bundle of proofs sent to us by head office, and plunder the bundle we all did. I came away with some interesting stuff that I’ll review over the next while, but the one I read first was the new Kate Atkinson. It’s called Started Early, Took my Dog (ooh, an Emily Dickinson quote, and I actually spotted it!), and is due to come out in August (I think…I passed the proof on to someone and can’t check), and it is (bookselling shorthand here…) “a Jackson book”, as in it features Jackson Brodie (ex-cop, sometime sleuth, now poetry-reading, cathedral-visiting man of leisure) the lead from her most recent novels. This one not only follows Jackson, as he tries to trace the roots of a New Zealand client, but also introduces ex-cop and now security supervisor at a shopping mall Tracy Waterhouse. Jackson Brodie is the kind of man any reader would like to spend time with, and Tracy is every bit as well-drawn and fascinating as he is. Supporting cast (and plot threads) include the heart-breakingly sliding-into-dementia Tilly, the internal monogue of whom reduced me to tears several times. I’m not going to spoiler anything here, if you’ve read Atkinson you’ll be familiar with the verve, wit, pathos and heartbreak of her books, and be well aware that she writes crime novels that don’t feel like “crime novels”. This is everything you could hope for if you are a fan. Laughter and tears both, and mysteries solved.

Last weekend I finally got my mitts on the new Alex Barclay book, which as it turns out, is called Time of Death (there was a lot of confusion about the title over the past year), it’s the second Ren Bryce book (to see what I thought of the first one click here). I was all agog to read the next one, and a little bit worried in the back of my mind that I was expecting too much. Stupid mind. I stayed up far far too late on Friday night reading it, lost a train journey to it on Saturday (even getting grumpy when I arrived at my destination because I had to stop reading), and finished it that evening. Not quite gulping it down in one sitting, but as close as circumstances would let me get to it.

There were many reasons why I loved the first book, and they’re all still present and correct in the second. This one, like the last, contains not just one mystery, but several, and the various strands are juggled seamlessly. That’s no mean feat, even for a writer with three previous books under her belt. As far as I can make out, the author’s preferred title for the book was Black Run, and I can’t help but feel that it’s more apt than the one it’s being sold under. Mayhap not everyone would get the skiing metaphor, but for those who do, it’s a straight clue-in to the pace and feel of the book. Put bluntly, Ren Bryce, who due to biology is always at the peak or trough of a very steep slope (she’s bipolar) is given a push off the top of an extremely precipitous peak in the opening pages, and everything she holds dear (her job, her family, her sanity) is placed under threat. Starts fast and doesn’t let up.

The main mystery is the murder of Ren’s psychiatrist, Dr Helen Wheeler, and Ren was the last person to see her alive. Not only has she lost her anchor, but circumstances seem to have been contrived to ensure that the murder will lead to the “outing” of Ren as a liability to the Safe Streets Task Force and the FBI (unmedicated, mentally ill, questionable judgement, and licensed to carry a weapon – oh my!). Not only that, but her family are under a cloud of suspicion in relation to a cold case in her home town, and it’s not easily cleared up since the family member concerned (Ren’s brother Beau) took his own life decades before.

Now as someone who reads more crime novels than anything else, I like to think I have various plotting possibilities down pat… I love to read Alex Barclay because whatever I think I’ve figured out, I’m usually wrong, and not just wrong but waaaay off-base. I started reading this and thought “Aha! Simples! This all comes down to blah!” only to be chastened and then intrigued as the real solutions came to light. It doesn’t hurt that Ren Bryce is one of my favourite characters in recent memory, smart, cheeky, by turns self-sabotaging and ambitious, considerate and hard-nosed. She’s complex and not in the way female heroines of crime series usually are. There’s nothing lazy or sterotypical in the descriptions of bipolar disorder and the way it affects people, nothing saccharine about the description of bereavement to suicide and the long, inky, stifling shadow it projects. Barclay consistently manages to keep it real in places where other authors can’t be bothered, and she does it all with an engaging blend of wit, compassion and hard-boiled pacing. Like Kate Atkinson, she pulls off the rare feat of making a crime novel into something more than what you expect, there will be tears and laughter for anyone reading this one too.

Tl;dr : Buy, read, enjoy!
Oh, and in case it wasn’t clear, Atkinson and Barclay are both on my “These will be classics” list. So’s Tana French. You can try to guess the other two!

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