Recent crime novels
Harriet Waugh
The Stranger House by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins, £12.99) is not a Dalziel and Pascoe detective novel but a highly enjoyable gothic confection. Two strangers are brought reluctantly together in the village of Illthwaite in Cumbria. Sam Flood, a small, red-headed Australian woman of 24, is about to take up a post at Cambridge as a mathematician but stops off at this gloomy village to explore her ancestry. Specifically she wants to find out more about her grandmother, also called Sam Flood, who was sent as an orphaned child to make a new life in Australia in 1960 but who did not long survive the experience. The only thing she knows about her is that she had once lived in Illthwaite. The locals, a backward-looking lot, deny all knowledge of her, but on that first day Sam is nearly killed in the village church, and later dis covers an overgrown plaque with the name Sam Flood on it in the graveyard wall.
The second visitor to Illthwaite, who is also putting up at the ancient pub, the Stranger House, is a young Spaniard, Miguel (known as Mig) Ramos Elkington Madero, who has recently left a Spanish seminary, having abandoned his vocation. Gaunt, with a limp and dressed entirely in black with an unusually oldfashioned mien, he has carried in secret the stigmata from early childhood. It was this affliction that gave him the idea that he was meant to become a priest rather than a wine-grower. He also sees ghosts. Like Sam he is on a quest into the past — in his case, researching an ancestor who came over as a boy in the Spanish Armada but failed to return home. It is all mixed up with an English priest, Father Simeon, who was tortured, though not martyred, during the reign of Elizabeth I and whose descendants now live in the big house on the hill. Violence erupts as the two quarrelling visitors pursue their seemingly separate agendas. Excellent.
In The Closers by Michael Connelly (Orion, £17.99) Harry Bosch comes in from the cold, rejoins the LAPD and is assigned to the department of unsolved crimes. The first cold case he is given a 16-year-old girl who in 1988 was taken from her bed and murdered near her parents’ house — becomes politically sensitive when Bosch and his partner Kiz Rider suspect the death to be tied in with a white supremacy group. The murdered girl was of mixed blood. This brings Bosch up against his previous boss, Deputy Chief Irving, who was in charge of the original investigation just when he is trying, in a most unlikely way, to change his spots and be all sweetness and light. There are plenty of twists; and this an enjoyable addition to the Bosch series.
The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell (Harvill, £14.99) is vintage Mankell, having been published in Sweden in 1994 but only now in Britain, and it is all the better for it. Inspector Kurt Wallander has been taking sick leave from the police force in Ystad for a year after a nervous breakdown fuelled by alcohol. This was brought on by shooting dead a criminal who would have killed him. Some of the time has been spent staying in a bed and breakfast in a Danish seaside resort in winter. An old acquaintance tracks him down there and asks for his help, as he suspects that his father, a lawyer who has recently died in a car crash, has in fact been murdered. Wallander, who has just decided to quit the force, refuses to get involved. But days later, when the acquaintance himself is murdered, Wallander pulls himself together, withdraws his resignation and takes control of the investigation. Suspicion falls on a multimillionaire Swedish international businessman, who is also a well-liked community benefactor, so Wallander and his team have to move circumspectly in their attempt to prove the case and discover the reason for the deaths. As usual with Mankell, there is a socio-political dimension to the plot. The fact that one knows who the villain is detracts from the immediacy, but it is still very enjoyable.
Double Play by Robert B. Parker (No Exit Press, £16.99) is a far cry from his Spencer series. It is set in 1947 when Jackie Robinson became the first black baseball player to break into the major league. Joseph Burke, an emotionally damaged white veteran of the second world war, is hired by the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers as a bodyguard to keep Jackie Robinson alive and out of trouble. His previous jobs have included being a failed boxer and a bodyguard to a mixedup girl, the daughter of a mafia-type businessman. He proves himself bright and suitably violent. Inevitably, past and present jobs collide. The novel is punctuated by the voice of Robert B. Parker as a child growing up during that era. All I can say is that it works. Burke starts out as a hero who, although he has a definite code of honour, appears close to being a psychopath. One watches him develop into something better through the offices of a dangerously unstable girl and the sterling courage and worth of Jackie Robinson. Ruth Rendell’s latest Wexford mystery, End in Tears (Hutchinson, £17.99), begins intriguingly. A man pushes a lump of concrete over the parapet of a bridge, aiming at a car. But he hits the wrong car, killing the couple inside. The car he had meant to hit was behind it, and the intended victim a single woman. The action then switches forward to the actual death of the intended victim. But as too often happens in the Wexford mysteries, Rendell is exploring a much written-about subject: baby-buying in all its different manifestations. The town of Kingsmarkham appears to be awash with desperate women wanting babies, surrogate babies, surrogate mothers, and scams for the production or non-production of infants. It is quite simply overstuffed with baby issues. Rendell is probably the best psychological thriller-writer there is, but she should have paused in the Wexford series until a genuinely creative mystery had burst upon her remarkable mind. End in Tears is not really worthy of her.
John Mortimer’s Quite Honestly (Viking, £17.99) is a delightful comedy of manners with a criminal theme. Do-gooding heroine joins an outfit reclaiming working-class villains from a life of crime. But is such a life more amusing than the grind of the office? Who, finally, is the villain and who the dogooder? This tale is without Rumpole, but you do not miss him!
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