Women guide the plot
Harriet Waugh
Social realism in the modern detective novel seems to demand that male detectives when married should have immensely irritating and humourless wives. Dora, the wife of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford, is the most realistic of these women. She sets your teeth on edge. But another example is Ellie, the wife of Peter Pascoe. In Recalled to Life (Harper Collins, £14.99, pp. 350), Reginald Hill teases the reader with the possibility that the Pascoes might separate. Alas, it is not to be — at least, not yet.
Recalled to Life is primarily a Detective- Superintendent Andrew Dalziel vehicle. It has Dalziel investigating a country-house murder that took place on his patch in 1963 when he was a young constable. At that time, both Cissy Kohler, a young American nanny, and the upper-class owner of the house were convicted of the murder of the latter's inconvenient mistress. He hanged for it on her evidence, while she has been in prison ever since.
Now, after some agitation, the Home Office has released her because the evi- dence that she was involved in the murder is deemed unsound. Dalziel's long- deceased boss, Wally Tallantire, is about to be made the scapegoat for the miscarriage of justice. Dalziel considers that the right people were convicted and sets out to defend his late boss and mentor's reputa- tion. Those staying at the house at the time of the murder were a young American CIA man, Cissy's employer and the victim's husband, who is related to the royal family, a self-made businessman and his American wife, an English politician and his hunting, shooting, county wife and assorted children and their nannies. It is all very promising and there appears to be a high-level cover- up going on, involving murder. Dalziel pur- sues his inquiries to America, confounding the natives.
However, it all gets absurd at the end. There is a danger that Mr Hill is beginning to fall in love with his creation, Dalziel, allowing him to become a comic caricature of his former self. This would be a pity as the tensions, differences and hard-earned friendship between sad, ugly, homosexual Sergeant Wield, intelligent, reflective Pascoe and fat, old-fashioned, instinctive, canny thug Dalziel make an extremely entertaining combination. Where fictional policemen are saddled with angry or irritating wives, female detec- tives are hardly ever married, which is real- ly very odd. Reginald Hill, under his nom-de-plume Annette Roome, created an excellent adulterous housewife called Chris whose husband (as a counterpart to Peter Pascoe's wife Ellie) is a ghastly, stuffy, car- washing, adulterous hypocrite. Unlike Pascoe, however, as soon as Chris realises what excitement lies beyond the home, she ups and leaves for the pleasures of an un- reliable photographer and a more or less empty bed. Such a pity! Mostly, though, the female detective becomes extremely ner- vous whenever a man shows the slightest sign of wishing to park alongside.
The prize for the most extreme case of emotional jitters must go to Sarah Paret- sky's V. I. Warshawski. Even a dog is too much company for her. She needs to share it. Rather too much time is given over to doggyland in her new novel, Guardian Angel (Hamish Hamilton, 04.99, pp. 438), but once the story gets under way it is as involving as ever.
Two non-lucrative cases absorb V. I.'s time. An old, unkempt woman on her street keeps a compound full of unruly, smelly dogs, to the annoyance of neigh- bours. When one day she collapses, a neighbouring yuppy gets power of attorney over her and, as she lies insensible in hospi- tal, has the dogs destroyed. V. I. goes on the war-path. This plot is juxtaposed with death by a blunt instrument and the drown- ing of an alcoholic, derelict friend of anoth- er neighbour, Mr Conteras. As is traditional in Sarah Paretsky's novels, this develops into a case of corporate chicanery and V. I. suffers her normal quota of bur- glaries, attempted murders and assault and battery. The dog story and that of corpo- rate greed are unconvincingly tied together at the end. If not one of the very best, Guardian Angel still has some intricate plotting, and a good deal of heart, and V. I. continues to pound the glitzy parts of Chicago as though they were its meanest streets.
Ann Cleeves is back on form with A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (Macmil- lan, £13.99, pp 192). This is the first good detective novel she has written since she switched from her ornithologist amateur detective to Inspector Stephen Ramsay of the country town of Otteridge. Dorothea, the beautiful and good wife of a weak vicar, is found strangled in some woods near a fairground. As Inspector Ramsay retraces
the victim's day it becomes apparent that Dorothea was inconveniently good and beautiful for a number of people. Then, within the same 24 hours, another murder takes place and Ramsay begins to get an inkling why Dorothea died and who did it. The novel is well constructed with difficult, convoluted emotions explored in a convinc- ing manner and no unnecessary and unlike- ly melodramatics marring its solution, as has happened in the other Ramsay books. Highly enjoyable.
Michael Dibdin's detective novels never have satisfactory endings, which is extreme- ly exasperating as he writes like an angel and his plots develop very enticingly. He also has a most unusual police detective. Inspector Aurelio Zen spends his time intriguing to survive in the politicised atmosphere of his Roman precinct. He is no crusader for inconvenient truth. In Cabal (Faber, 04.99, pp. 288), he is called to the Vatican after a decadent Roman prince has thrown himself off a high bal- cony inside the dome of St Peter's. It does not take him five minutes to realise that the death is murder and hardly more to decide that discretion is called for and to start covering up the crime. Nor does his helpfulness stop there. When, later, a scapegoat is called for, Zen is perfectly happy to set up a Vatican guard to take the rap for murder. It is only when the guard is murdered that Zen decides enough is enough.
This is a wonderful mixture, made up of the worlds of Italian politics, Vatican morals, church banking scandals, the secret life of the Knights of Malta (that idea alone is high camp) and the financial exi- gencies of dress-making. Sadly, at the end it all falls apart into silliness.
In For the Sake of Elena (Bantam, £13.99, pp.352) Elisabeth George has written a gripping detective story with plenty of sus- pects and motives. A pretty, deaf student, Elena Weaver, is murdered early one morning when out jogging. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and a female side-kick are sent from Scotland Yard to look into it. He finds that Elena, the over- protected daughter of a history professor at the university, has been living an emotion- ally complex life that left a good many peo- ple with mixed feelings about her. Among those whose emotions run deep is her guilt- ridden father, her stepmother, a number of lovers, a charismatic tutor who might have sexually harassed her, and the tortured female artist who found the body.
Elisabeth George has a few stylistic ticks. The female love interest is nearly always referred to by her title, while her sister is called by her Christian name and the sister's husband by his surname. Odd. All in all, though, this is a very enjoyable book in which the characters' emotions develop and become more complex as the story progresses. The logistics of the murder and the motive are satisfactorily worked out, which is unusual nowadays.
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