A choice of recent crime fiction
Harriet Waugh
ill Benson, Charles Spencer's shambolic, alcoholic, hero in Under the Influence (Allison & Busby, £16.99) is not entirely unlike Simon Brett's alcoholic actor detective Charles Paris. Both want to get back together with their wives, both of them have a penchant for finding themselves in farcical, humiliating situations, and both of them are involved with the theatre (neither very successfully), although in Will's case his connection is only tangential through his job as a hack working for an obscure publication called Theatre World.
Will Benson stumbles into his adventure in Under the Influence trying to save a friend of his youth whom he once heroworshipped from ruination and prison. In 1982 when Will was 17 going on 18 he had worked during his gap year for a local rag called the Esher Herald and became part of a group, the maverick leader of which was Henry, then aged 22, the star reporter. Will developed a tendresse for Henry's 15-yearold sister Rose, while Henry seduced both Nicholas, who is also filling in time at the Herald before going up to university, and his glamorous sister Natasha, who wishes to marry a rich man and live a life of ease. Under the steady gaze of reliable Trey the Rev (another editor on the Herald). who intends to become a clergyman), he introduces them to dope and to fairly innocent bacchanalian delights. Now 20 years on, Nicholas; an art historian in the last throes of Aids, contacts Will to say that Henry had called on him bearing a hugely important missing Vermeer. Hoping to save Henry from himself, Will and the sexually voracious and kinky Natasha (who is married to her rich man) set out to track him down and rescue the picture. Nothing, however, is as it seems, and Will is soon out of his depth and awash in alcohol. Under the Influence is the greatest fun and,
except for the final confrontation when everybody's behaviour is mind-bogglingly inept, it is easy to suspend disbelief and swing along in Will and Natasha's wake.
Rebecca Tope is a restless writer who refuses to give the reader the lazy satisfaction of settling to know and become happily familiar with one detective. She flits back and forth. This time she alights on her undertaker amateur detective, Drew Slocombe, who last starred in Dark Undertakings. In that book Drew, new to undertaking, sniffs out poison when a deceased customer's West Highland terrier drops dead within a few hours of his master. In Grave Concerns (Piatkus, £17.99), he has launched his own undertaking business in rivalry with his former employer, and has a very young black woman as partner. His new concern is to bring an ecological basis to the business of burial. The dead will be buried in reed cots in a field where they will biodegrade and add nutrients to the good earth. A few, appropriate, un-Godlike words will be spoken by him, and the family and friends will go uplifted away, and not much poorer for the experience. That, in any case, is Drew's theory of what will happen. Unfortunately, before his business is fairly under way the body of an elderly woman, laid out nicely, is discovered buried in his field. •The police show only minimal interest in discovering who she is or who placed her there. But Drew becomes involved when a pregnant Genevieve Slate turns up on his doorstep saying that she thinks the body might be that of her mother and she suspects that her husband might have killed her. She is reluctant to go to the police as the body may not be her mother's and her husband might be innocent. She therefore proposes that she pay Drew to investigate. Drew, despite being married to the long-suffering Karen, who is also pregnant, is drawn to Genevieve. who turns out to be an extremely wild card. Altogether this is an excellent black comedy. Rebecca Tope enters with relish into the more gruesome aspects of burial, but there is an exceedingly funny giving-birth scene to complement all the diggings-up going on.
Donna Leon's A Sea of Troubles (William Heinemann, £15.99) is, as usual, set in Venice although this time on the poor fishing island of Pellestrina. Our good policeman, Commissario Brunetti, is called out to investigate the death of two fishermen, a father and son. The close-knit fishing community clam up (they view the police as the enemy), and Brunetti, much against his conscience, allows his secretary, Signorina Elettra, who has relatives on the island, to take a vocation there in the hope that she can find out what the fishermen know. When the body of a woman is picked up in the lagoon by a fishing vessel Brunetti knows he may have made a big mistake.
A Sea of Troubles is one of Donna Leon's best novels. The miserable web of indolence and corruption with which Brunetti has to contend to arrive at the truth is handled with a lighter touch than in some of her other books, and the alliances, friendships and in this case love interest give the book a warm glow. However, I will never again eat clams in Venice after reading it.
Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz (Headline £9.99) is an enjoyable mystery novel. At its heart is the relationship between two sisters and the death of the younger by drowning, which haunts the lives of her surviving family. Ruth is only three when her mother falls through the ice and drowns one freezing cold night on the lake, but she suffers a visceral belief that she drowned too. But of course she could not have died as here she is, being brought up by her Aunt Amanda, her mother's sister who loves her passionately.
The novel, set in America in rural Wisconsin, ranges from 1919 to 1941. In 1919 Amanda, a nurse, is sent away from the war front suffering from stress and returns home to the farm where she and her sister Mattie were brought up. Their parents are dead, and Mattie now lives there with her little daughter Ruth while her husband Carl is at the war. Amanda hopes to find peace, and has no doubt of her welcome as she and Mattie have always been very close, but she brings back more than the stress she is supposedly suffering, and when Carl returns wounded from the war he finds his young wife dead and his sister-inlaw in command of his child and the farm. It is not until 1941 when Ruth is a young woman that she and the reader finally discover how Mattie came to die and Ruth to live all those years ago.
This is Christina Schwarz's first novel. She writes very well about strong, complex emotions which she wraps in a softer romantic covering — a very winning combination.
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