Crime fiction (2)

Old tricks

Peter Ackroyd

North Kill James Wood (Hutchinson £2.60) The Bengali Inheritance Owen Sela (Hodder and Stoughton £2.95) The Clients of Omega Dennis Bloodworth (Secker and Warburg £3.25) Mr Wood's twenty-first novel opens 'quite appropriately with the dissection of a corpse: this is a surgical technique which comes in very useful when reviewing 'thriller' fiction. There are, in fact, a number of corpses in North Kill and some of them are walking around and talking: Cameron absently tapped the heavy curve of his jaw with the tips of the stained forceps, his eyes half-closing against the smoke of his cigarette. 'You know, that's a good question.'

'The job, Doc — asking good questions,' Rimmer said.

'Glad I'm an honest quack,' Cameron said

• Nothing should ever be left to the imagination no doubt on the old colonial principle that if you shout loudly enough you will be understood; it is also very important that nothing original or amusing is said, since this might detract from Mr Wood's efforts to be 'forceful' and 'realistic' although, judging by the picture of him gripping a cigarette between what might be lips, his 'realism' is a matter of tranquility being recollected in emotion. Mr Wood also makes sure that his characters never say anything of interest: not only would he consider it unbearably effete, but it might also compare unfavourably with his plot.

Anthony Belasco, who surprised me by being an Italian gangster, has been shot three times and killed: who did it? As far as I can remember, the man who confessed to it did it but I was more interested in discovering how Mr Wood increases this small nugget of information to some two hundred pages. What he does is concentrate upon the more romantic details of police procedure, and turn such fine upstanding specimens of cardboard as Inspector 'Jumbo' Collins and Policewoman Sheila 'Slim' Summerville into heroes of our time: 'Slim' Summerville was my favourite. But Mr Wood also stuffs a great deal of technical jargon down their throats and, since jargon is only used by people who are unsure of themselves, the general effect is that of actors trying very hard to become characters. Of course policemen are beyond mere words, and 'Jumbo' Collins stays in character by letting out one long, low grunt — "Can't say more'n that" — at moments of crisis and, when the going gets rough. . . some dots will serve.

It may, of course, seem pointless to try and crack this very small stone when it is actually made of softer and dirtier stuff. If pornography is the material which deadens human responses, castrates human emotions and reduces the whole of human life to mechanical terms, then North Kill — and other books like it — is the work of the most arrant pornography. It is not that there is any explicit violence — that would be harmless enough — but rather that there is a streak of submerged sadism which runs through the book and which turns its prose into a toneless, nerveless, dead thing. It is really a handbook for the fantasist, since it refuses to recognise the real world and retreats instead to a world of flat and lurid colours which no doubt correspond to a few flat and lurid emotions.

Mr Wood has a passion for those who dress themselves in the trappings of authority — this is a form of transvestism very common in certain quarters. He says himself that he is against "villains" and "do-gooders," but I get the impression that he is actually against everybody except 'Jumbo' Collins and 'Slim' Summerville: his narrow range of emotions can only find their outlet in an equally narrow prose, and it is typical that the expression of any emotion which is not of hatred or fear should be reduced to external and hollow stereotype. Here is 'Jumbo' leaving the stale world behind in order to celebrate the higher emotions with his loving wife:

'Pig,' she said, 'Remind me to go off you some time.' 'If I remember,' Collins whispered to her.

There are four clichés here, and Jumbo and Wife become mere zones for the expression of cliché. Mr Wood even manages to turn religion into a cliche by becoming sanctimonious, with a young priest saying ("evenly") such things as "Why else would I live my life?" and "You are not a foolish man, Inspector." But sanctimoniousness is always a willing accomplice of fantasy, since they dwell in that same hidden spot where emotions go clashing in the dark.

Of course I am taking this persiflage too seriously: mindless pornography never did

anyone any harm, and in any case the plot's the thing. There is a great deal of plot in The Bengali Inheritance, and Owen Sela doesn't believe in obscuring the issue with gaudy

imaginings and fancy language. An Indian has been murdered in Hong Kong and even as Senior Chief Inspector Richard Chan, the man with the "chubby, scarred" hands, races to the scene of the crime a network of mystery and intrigue blackens the already polluted air of our famous colony. There are so many past tenses ("Chan sat .. . Chan looked ... Chan fell") that it becomes impossible to remember in which particular order anything happens, but the adventure involves a certain Watanabe, who was once the head of something sinister, an Indian expatriate organisation (which has since moved to Britain, I see), a crashed plane,

a consignment of gold, a prostitute of the soi-disant school and even a mention of Chief Inspector Godber, who seems quite at home in a novel.

No space is wastErd on the formation of character, am' everybody talks in that rudi mentary sign-language which is meant to convey the maximum amount of information in the smallest possible space: they are a great many groans and grunts. When a plot is mechanical everything becomes a spare part, and even mannerisms can be treated as objects: as Mr Sela puts it, "his blazer and his suavity showed that . .," which is known as two ideas being yoked violently together. Events "trigger off" other events, in much the same way as "memories" — as Mr Sela himself described it — "trigger off" people. Character, motive, plot, surprise, reversal, recognition — in fact all of the constituents of imaginative fiction since the fourth century BC — are taken to a. point of no

return and the sheer 'enjoyment' of reading a thriller is the sheer enjoyment of reading about the techniques of the novel.

And since it is such an artificial form, with sacred conventions you break at your peril, it becomes extremely difficult to parody. Dennis

Bloodworth has tried in The Clients of Omega. and he has taken all of the clichés and turned them on their heads; unfortunately, he has forgotten that clichés remain clichés even when they are upside down. I counted at least four plots which, for a novel based in Singapore, is a little on the thin side. The details, which,

have to do with a sinister international conspiracy and a sinister multinational corporation, escape me for the moment. There are a great many characters with names lil5e Wanson, Wong Tak Sang, Te Wu and Thinking Lotus, but they are laid on with such a heavy trowel that I have a feeling Mr Bloodworth is trying to be deliberately obscure. But in a book which is such an odd mixture of disparagement and enthusiasm, it is very difficult to be sure.