Gothic and comic thrillers
Harriet Waugh
GALLOWGLASS by Barbara Vine
Viking, f13.99, pp.296
THE CAVALIER CASE by Antonia Fraser
Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp.209
Agallowglass is an ancient Irish word for a chief's servant, and that is how Joe, the sad 26-year-old outcast who tells the story, sees himself in relationship to San- dor. Sandor is a glamorous, educated, good-looking, mixed-up young man who saves Joe, the product of a miserable childhood, from possible suicide and tells him (to Joe's delight) that his life now belongs to him. Sandor appears to be the delinquent son of middle-class parents who steals his mother's gold card and car. In fact he turns out to be more sinister, mysterious and pathetic than this. He and Joe travel the byways of Suffolk, staying in gloomy bed-and-breakfasts while Sandor tells Joe stories. The main story concerns a beautiful English girl who married an elderly Italian prince. She is kidnapped in Rome by some amateur mafiosi and an Englishman and kept chained in a tent in a room. The Englishman attends to her needs until the ransom is paid, after which the elderly prince dies of a heart-attack, leaving her a rich widow. Joe loves San- dor's stories.
Joe sometimes gives the impression that he is slightly retarded, but if he is it is only in an emotional sense, due to his extremely deprived background. He is neither vicious nor, by nature, unkind, but he lacks that social awareness that usually develops dur- ing childhood into a code of acceptable behaviour. He is in thrall to Sandor and nothing else counts.
Between story sessions, Indian take- aways and sudden splurges in gold-card restaurants, Sandor makes Joe follow the cars that come and go out of a highly fortified country estate in Suffolk in which live a beautiful woman, her security- obsessed husband, her bodyguard/chauf- feur and his little girl. Joe never questions Sandor, because if he does there is likely to be a minor accident with a razor in which he gets hurt. He thinks that Sandor wants to turn him into a masochist, but as he loves him unreservedly he does not care. The games that Sandor plays take on a reality when Joe's adoptive sister, Tilly, turns up. Besides Sandor, Tilly is the only person Joe loves. Tilly is a flashy, hard young woman who is as inexperienced in crime as Joe is, but she is not into games-playing.
The novel is strong and tense and full of possibilities until Tilly's arrival on the scene. Then, as the plan goes into opera- tion and Sandor's true motives become obvious, it runs out of steam. Recently (by which I mean Barbara Vine's last novel and this), a rosy romantic tinge has settled on her writing which is transforming her from a convincing psychological realist into a gothic fantasist. This is a pity. Her last Ruth Rendel psychological thriller, although about love and obsession and descending at the end into gothic horror, cannot be accused of being suffused with an artificial romantic glow. So we can only hope that this softening of the grey matter under the Barbara Vine hat does not spread to Ruth Rendel. Personally, I have become very frightened of mad cow dis- ease.
Antonia Fraser's new Jemima Shore detective mystery, The Cavalier Case, is, of course, a very different kettle of fish. For one thing, Antonia Fraser writes comedies, and with each novel they become funnier. Quite soon she will be rivelling Delano Ames with his legendary detective-duo Jane and Dagobert Brown for enjoyable dialogue, comic situations and good intri- cate plotting: an irresistible combination.
The Cavalier Case has Jemima, the glamorous television personality, between lovers again. Her long-term lover, Cass, who yearns for domesticity, has returned to her from a rebound marriage only, to Jemima's annoyance, to go back again to his wife. In this emotional hiatus Jemima falls in love with a portrait of a cavalier of which she has temporary custody. He is the poet Decimus Meredith, 1st Viscount Lackland, who died under romantic cir- cumstances during the Cromwellian wars. Forced to do a crass documentary on haunted houses, she subverts the project into an examination of her own particular cavalier and the supposed haunting by him of his family home, Lackland Court. This brings her into contact with his descen- dants and the odd goings-on at the house.
The present owner, Thomas Anthony Decimus Meredith, 18th Viscount Lack- land (the 17th Viscount having recently fallen to his death down the staircase while intoxicated, possibly after seeing the 1st Viscount's ghost) is an international tennis star known as Handsome Dan. He intends to turn Lackland Court into a tennis club. He does not believe in the ghost. His sister Zena, however, who writes highly success- ful historical novels and is obsessed by him and by the family history to the extent of cutting a dash by going around dressed up as the 1st Viscount, does not discount it. Nor does Nell, the sad daughter of Dan's first marriage to the crazy, embittered Babs. As for the butler, before Jemima can get his views on the ghost (and, for that matter, the manner of his late master's death), he is pushed from the battlements one starry night.
The only thing you can be quite sure of in The Cavalier Case is that The Butler Didn't Do It. However, What The Butler Saw is crucial. Jemima has a tough time sorting it all out, not made easier by being seduced by her chief suspect in the most enjoyable tennis game of her life, in a fashionable tennis club in London, not unlike the Vanderbilt, in which all the characters and suspects cavort.
The novel is enormous fun and the who-did-it and the why-they-did-it is satisfyingly resolved. For once — an in- creasing rarity in modern detective fiction — the guilty party is taken off to face a judge and jury. Antonia Fraser's best so far.
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