From Cambridge to St Petersburg
Harriet Waugh
DEAD MEAT by Philip Kerr Chatto and Windus, 174.99, pp.243
A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION by Philip Kerr Arrow, £4.95, pp.36I Dead Meat is Philip Kerr's fifth crime novel, but it was his last novel A Philosophi- cal Investigation that brought him wider attention garnering such commendations as 'Breathtakingly clever ... awesomely ambi- tious ... like Bladerunner rewritten by Borges', and again 'Philip Kerr, like Borges, takes his crime seriously and philo- sophically. In his own field he is superla- tively armed and gifted.' It is odd how Borges crops up twice but there you are; you might just as well have said that he takes his crime as seriously and philosophi- cally as Wittgenstein; which brings me to the subject of A Philosophical Investigation.
It is set in the future and has a man-hat- ing Chief Inspector, Jake, as heroine.Jake specialises in serial killings. In particular she is in charge of a case where a number of men have been shot six times in the back of their heads. The victims had all belonged to something called the Lom- broso program; they had all been diag- nosed as genetically deficient in a particular substance that made them liable to become serial killers. In order that nobody should be identified who was suf- fering from this disorder (it could have affected their social and work prospects) they had each been given a code name. Not even the councillors who dealt with them knew who they were. The code names were mostly those of philosophers and writers.
It turned out, however, that one of them, Wittgenstein, had broken the computer code protecting the names, erased his own, and was murdering the others. But who was he? It also transpires that Wittgenstein identifies with the real philosopher Wittgenstein, and in his notebooks, to which the reader is privy, discusses and jus- tifies his behaviour in the manner that the real Wittgenstein might well have done had he been a serial killer. In order to try and trap him it is thought necessary that a Cambridge moral philosopher should engage him in dialogue. This is all rather
fun and gives Mr Kerr leeway for some amusing high jinks.
Moral philosophy takes yet another leap when Jake discovers that she is racing against time to finger her man before the Home Office succeeds in bringing the inquiry to an end by a devious route which would save them some public scandal. There are also some good jokes at the expense of the future. For instance, since our time musicals on the Yorkshire Ripper and Myra Hindley have joined Sweeney Todd and others of that ilk. The only real criticism of A Philosophical Investigation is that it is enjoyable rather than truly racy and hair raising. Given the subject matter of the novel this is perhaps a more serious criticism of Philip Kerr's writing than would at first appear. It is after all a very accomplished novel.
Dead Meat, which is to be turned into a BBC production, returns the reader to more regular detective fare. An un-named investigator from Moscow is sent to St Petersburg ostensibly to learn how its econ- omy copes with being undermined by the Mafia underworld (Balkan gangsters). In fact he is there to check on the integrity of its leading officer in the war on the Mafia, Detective Grushko. Grushko, whose integrity is in no doubt with the reader, sus- pects the motives of the investigator but plays a straight bat by including him in the investigative processes of the department.
While we follow the inves,tigator as he provides an admirable guide to St Peters- burg, an explosion in a fashionable restau- rant uncovers a refrigerator full of suspiciously high quality meat, while a famous Jewish investigative journalist, Mikail Milyukin, is found shot in the back of the head in a car. In the boot there is a Georgian gangster shot in the mouth. It looks as though the Georgian had been giv- ing information to Milyukin and they had both been killed by his playmates. But as bodies continue to climb it looks more like a gangster war brought on by the Geor- gians' conviction that their man had been killed by a rival group. Then it turns out that the KGB have been tapping Milyukin's telephone and that Milyukin tried to hire a bodyguard two days before he died and that a prisoner with a grudge against him had been unexpectedly released from prison. This leads to the suspicion that there is anti-Semitism at work in the department.
All this is perfectly acceptable if routine thriller material, and within that framework Mr Kerr delivers a satisfactory dénoue- ment. However the investigator as inter- locutor comes between the reader and the action. Added to which the characters are only dimly realised and there are unexpect- ed languors. In retrospect it is easy to see that A Philosophical Investigation suffers from much the same faults, but the way that novel is compiled and the vividness of its futuristic vision of England made them seem unimportant.
Previous page
