English country murders
Harriet Waugh
Ann Cleeves's new Inspector Ramsay novel, The Healers (Macmillan f14.99), has Lily and Daniel, a couple of new-age travellers, finding the uncouth, middle- aged farmer on whose land they live in their caravan, strangled in his farmhouse kitchen. The farmer is a disagreeable loner who, on the evening of his death, met a woman from a dating agency in a local restaurant. Despite being attracted to Lily, Gordon Hunter, Inspector Ramsay's sergeant, suspects the travellers, believing them to be a bad lot generally. Ramsay takes a broader view. Then a respectable housewife is strangled, and an anonymous letter suggests that the police investigate the earlier suicide of a young girl. The con- necting link appears to be the alternative therapy centre in town where Lily works in the health-food shop. There are enough unhappy relationships to keep the reader, Ramsay and Hunter extremely busy. Then there is another murder.
Ann Cleeves is a tough and skillful writ- er. Her plots are good, her characterisation even better, but she does not play accord- ing to the rules, and it has taken some determination to become addicted. Her detective heroes — she runs a stable of two — are not entirely likeable. Inspector Ramsay has no relationship with Sergeant Hunter. In fact the two despise each other. This is not what the reader wants or expects. Detective fiction uses team work; the hero is the brains while the side-kick does the necessary routine. Traditionally, the two appreciate one another. Thrillers are written this way because readers like it. In The Healers Sergeant Hunter becomes a crass, knee-jerk yob. In previous novels he might have been a conceited, anti- intellectual action man, but he was capable of offering, even if this was unacceptable to Ramsay, momentary rough camaraderie. Personally I sigh for the convention, even though I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.
Elizabeth Ironside's first novel, A Very Private Enterprise, won the John Creasy award and is now in paperback. Her second, Death in the Garden (Hodder & Stoughton, L16.99), tells the story of Diana Pollexfen, a beautiful bohemian photo- grapher who in 1925 was accused and acquitted of murdering her conventional, war-damaged, MP husband. The murder, a poisoning with photographic developing chemicals, took place at a weekend party at the Pollexfen's country house in Rutland. Sixty years later, Helena, the niece of Mrs Pollexfen's second husband, who inherits her house, tries to unravel what happened that fateful weekend and decide if her beloved aunt was guilty.
The novel ranges between the less inter- esting modern drama of Helena and her cousins and the unfolding tragedy at the Pollexfen's house, where a group of Diana's friends gathers to celebrate her 30th birthday and deplore the philistine unreasonableness of George, her angry husband. Although I guessed who had done what rather too early, this a nicely written, more tightly composed and better plotted novel than Elizabeth Ironside's first, award-winning one. Recommended.
Judy Mercer's first novel Fast Forward (Doubleday, £15.99) has a particularly excellent beginning. Ariel Gold, an investigative journalist on an American television programme, wakes up one day in a strange bed in a strange, ransacked room. She staggers to the mirror and fails to recognise the blurred, fat person con- fronting her. She has amnesia of a particu- larly disconcerting kind. Her self-image tells her that she should be willowy, beauti- ful, soignée and stylish. Instead, her clothes are frumpy, and to add to her woes she is as blind as a bat. A blood-soaked T-shirt and a gun lie on her bed. Is she victim or villain? There is also a dog who seems friendly.
The beginning is so good that it is not surprising that the rest does not quite mea- sure up. The thrust of the novel, which fol- lows Ariel's attempt to find out why she is in this state, works well. There are two main strands, both adequately plotted, but in bringing them together Judy Mercer allows so many coincidences to pile up, which she then wraps in an unlikely meta- physical package, that the reader's creduli- ty finally snaps. Despite this, Fast Forward is an enjoyable first novel from an accom- plished writer.
Dick Francis's Come to Grief (Michael Joseph, £15.99) is not so much a who-done- it, but can Sid Halley, Francis's ex-jockey private detective who investigates horsy 'Excuse me, but! believe this is a no smoking area.' matters, get the courts to convict national television celebrity, ex-jockey and ex-friend Ellis Quint of being a pervert who in the dead of night goes into fields and maims horses? The first half details the unfolding of the case, and how Sid comes to believe the unbelievable. In the second half Sid, battered, tortured, shot and abused, break the case and delivers his man. Dick Francis's novels roughly divide between romantic and sado-masochistic, action- packed detection. This one is the latter.
Last Act of All by Aline Templeton (Con- stable, £14.99) opens with the heroine, Helena, leaving prison after serving a very short sentence for the murder of her first husband, Neville Fielding, a television star, to which she had pleaded guilty. There is an uneasy meeting with her affectionate husband Edward Radley, and a dreadful one with Stephanie, her teenage daughter from her first marriage. A long flashback follows, showing how the fateful decision of Neville Fielding to attach his dark nature to that of the equally dark, inbred Fenland village of Radnesfield leads to the final destruction of their marriage and to his death.
At this point enter Detective Sergeant Frances Howarth, responsible for having put Helena behind bars. In the interim she has come to the conclusion that Helena is innocent. Reopening the case means open- ing up Radnesfield's enclosed society to the clear light of the 20th century. It takes another murder before the village finally divulges its secrets.
Last Act of All is Aline Templeton's sec- ond novel. I missed her first, but on the evidence of this I look forward greatly to her third.
Emma Cave writes novels too rarely and in the past has been inappropriately marketed as a romantic novelist. At her best she writes mordant, black psychologi- cal thrillers. Bluebeard's Room (Hodder, £16.99), a drama of oblique evil, is not quite one of these. Lucy Rivens is pretty, has long blonde hair and comes from an old Catholic family. She is thoroughly good, thoroughly nice and not un- intelligent. She is engaged to a much- married older man called Rupert with amazing blue eyes and an urbane manner who, in the tradition of roués, loves her for her blonde hair and for her fresh, sweet innocence. He is even prepared to convert to please her. Then Vee, Lucy's tough American friend, comes to stay. She discov- ers that Rupert's pleasing aspect covers a monumental callous selfishness that laid waste his previous marriages, and that something far darker and nastier lurks within his shadowy psyche.
Emma Cave tells the reader rather more Catholic history than is necessary for a full understanding of Lucy, and of the under- lying motif of the picture of the Good and Bad Angel that hangs above Rupert's bed. Despite this fault, Bluebeard's Room is very entertaining.
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