Recent crime novels
Harriet Waugh
• Ruth Rendell's unfolding tale of a girl growing up with a sympathetic but psycho- pathic mother is decidedly odd. The Crocodile Bird (Hutchinson, £14.99) unfolds in a series of flashbacks as Liza, its 17-year-old heroine, embarks on modern life under the protection of her handsome, well-intentioned, working-class lover, Sean. Liza's mother, Eve, has been arrested for murder and Liza, whose unworldly child- hood has been punctuated by her mother's lethal way with problematic men, has left just ahead of the police so as not to be a witness, This is a curiously romantic story. Ruth Rendell appears to take a fresh, sym- pathetic look at Daphne du Maurier's Mrs Danvers and, in her creation of Eve, shows how obsession with a beautiful house might turn a reclusive, intelligent and conscience- less woman into a multiple killer. This novel is really very rum, but although soft- centred and not very likely it is enjoyable.
A better novel in which the story unfolds towards a final catastrophe is Robert Richardson's The Hand of Strange Children (Gollancz, £14.99). The reader is cryptically informed, at the start, through press releas- es of the violent deaths of two members of a family party on Boxing Day in Hertford- shire. The house there belongs to a merchant banker, Charles Stansfield. The deaths are connected with the childhood Past of Naomi (his wife) and her twin brothers, Tim and Richard Barlow. The climactic ending reveals who died and why. The theme of The Hand of Strange Children, like the best, early works of Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, is how a crime committed in youth distorts the development of the characters in the Present with, in this case, violent conse- quences.
Ann Cleeve likes tackling difficult sub- jects, and her characters are inclined to be intense and emotionally awkward. So her novels are successful only when the plots are compellingly propelled and satisfactori- ly resolved. In Kill Joy (Macmillan, £13.99) she pulls it off. A teenager, Gabriella Paston, lead player in a youth theatre pro- duction in the depressed, troubled town of Hollowgate, North Tyneside, goes missing from rehearsal and is found strangled in the boot of the director's car. Miss Cleeve involves the entire town, as the strands of Gabriella's life are unravelled. Her
boyfriend, the chief of police's son, is developing into a secret tearaway. Her grandmother and aunt, who brought her up, blame the chief of police for her father's death and appear to be running a Fagin's kitchen in the housing estate. The director of the youth theatre is trying to break his contract with the town, is finan- cially embarrassed and having an affair with a married woman which is getting out of hand.
The town is close to becoming unmanageable, as joy-riders and ram- raiders nightly assault it. How connected these strands are only gradually becomes apparent and it takes a second death before Detective Inspector Ramsay, on secondment to the town, begins to see how they tie up. This is a dense, low-key, novel. For me, though, Stephen Ramsay, who is insufficiently centred, will always be a weak link-man. In the most enjoyable detective series, renewing one's acquain- tance with Dalgliesh, Wexford, Jim Chee, Anna Lee, Kinsey Millhone, Aurelio Zen or Charles Paris is part of the considerable pleasure of reading the mysteries. Inspec- tor Ramsay will never have that appeal for me.
Takeout Double by Susan Moody (Head- line, £15.99) introduces a new detective. Cassie Swann is a Junoesque young woman who has given up teaching to become a bridge professional. Then at a bridge week- end at a country-house hotel three of her class are discovered dead at the table. Soon Cassie's new career seems doomed, as these are not the only deaths that follow in the wake of her bridge-playing. Invitations dry up and she decides that the only way forward is to do some investigating. Cassie,
who fluctuates between bourgeois respectability and a hankering after her more vulgar early roots, is an endearing newcomer to the now teaming collection of female private eyes.
Recently there has been an influx in environmentally sensitive detective novels of varying quality. Nuclear waste, govern- mental duplicity, animal genetic tampering, and duplicitous greedy companies have taken the place of Russia as the Big Bad Wolf, The best of these is Ken McClure's Crisis (Simon & Schuster, £14.95). Cur-
mudgeonly bachelor pathologist Ian Ban- nerman is called in by Whitehall when three agricultural workers from a farm in Scotland die of what appears to be scrapie, an incurable brain disease that attacks sheep and under the name 'Mad Cow Disease', cattle. If the men have died of scrapie it means it has passed the human barrier, with incalculable consequences to British farming. Whitehall wants to keep the lid on the story; Bannerman is more interested in the truth. Murder raises its head, and Ian, who has his own environ- mental prejudices, .begins by chasing the wrong villain. A slightly too melodramatic ending mars an otherwise intelligently plot- ted story
Likeable but more flawed is Death in a Strange Counuy by Donna Leon (Chap- mans, £14.99). Commissario Guido Brunet- ti of the Venice police, investigating the apparently murderous mugging of an air- force sergeant from an American base out- side Venice begins to suspect there is more to the death than meets the eye when he discovers heroin planted in the victim's flat. Then a second death occurs, connected to the American base. Brunetti has to enlist the help of the very forces of wickedness that allow man to be threatened by man- made disasters before he can clear up the mess. In order to bring in as much poten- tial for villainy as possible Donna Leon overloads the plot, leaving some glaring holes in the solution; but Brunetti is a like- able detective and for two thirds of its length the novel is pleasantly intriguing.
Self-righteousness destroys Sarah Dunant's Flatlands (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). Her female private eye, Hannah Wolfe, a crude cross between Sarah Paret- sky's V. I. Warshawski and Liza Cody's funny, gutsy Anna Lee (but with none of the latter's humour), is sent to chaperone a mixed-up teenager on a day out from school whose scientist father is on an animal rights hit-list. When the girl gets blown up, Hannah sets out to discover why she died, and why animal rights are after Dad. A nicely convoluted plot is thrown away by the aggressive signals Hannah gives off, which makes the villain stand out much too clearly. Also Hannah is too neurotic to be a likeable heroine. A pity.
'Don't have any more, Mrs Moore!.'
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