A selection of recent thrillers
Harriet Waugh
Andrew Taylor is a writer who constantly surprises. On a light level, his comedy thrillers, starring his clever, amoral and emotionally immature hero William Dougal, are fast-moving, twisted confec- tions in which wounds heal and dead bodies are used for the heartless manipula- tion of events, while his psychological thrillers are compelling studies in character and behaviour that rival Ruth Rendell.
Now with An Air that Kills (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99), he has come up with a third strand. Perhaps, having decided that the heyday of the English detective novel lies in the Forties and Fifties, Mr Taylor has delivered a trailer for a new series of traditional detective novels set in the decade after the Second World War. He has both a male and female protagonist separated by the gulf of class and circum- stances who may (who knows?) in future novels have an adulterous affair.
Inspector Thornhill has newly arrived at the market town of Lynmouth on the borders of Wales. He is married to a harassed housewife and has two children. A complex and not altogether easy man, he is unfulfilled by marriage, while his rela- tionship with his self-serving new boss, Superintendent Williamson, is difficult. The case starts with the unearthing of some Infant bones under the floor of an old pub, which is being demolished. The ramifica- tions of the discovery lead to two murders and gradually wind out to embrace pillars of local society and the world of petty crim- inality.
To make up for a downbeat hero, Taylor gives us as a heroine a beautiful journalist recovering from an unhappy love affair with a married man. As she goes out to tea and drinks on the county circuit, while stay- ing with the local newspaper proprietor and his wife, Jill Frances reluctantly comes to understand how a crime in the past has led to one in the present. This causes her to clash with Thornhill.
Andrew Taylor's humour and flash cleverness are absent from this new offering and I must admit to missing them. But it is possible that the Thornhill/Jill Frances novels will develop to become reliable favourites in the future.
I don't warm to Inspector Lynley and his uncouth assistant Barbara Havers and we are given rather too much of their private Concerns for my liking in Elizabeth George's Playing for the Ashes (Bantam Press, £15.99). The plot concerns the death of England's foremost batsman in the country cottage in which his mistress, the wife of the sponsor of the Australian Test Match, is staying. Kenneth Fleming, the cricketer, turns out to have been a thor- oughly likeable, well-meaning man whose life was distorted by the possessiveness of three women, the school mistress who recognised the talent of a working-class boy, his wife whose horizons became too limited for him, and his mistress who intended that they should marry.
As a rule, Elizabeth George is good at developing an intricate plot with characters whose banked-up emotions are on the verge of imploding. Enough of these ingre- dients are present here to make Playing for the Ashes enjoyable. The intractability of relationships and the misery and anger engendered in Fleming's children make for engrossing reading. Less riveting is a sub- plot, only tenuously woven in, about Olivia, the daughter of the school mistress who nurtured Fleming's talent and ambitions. ' Her self-pitying journal takes up at least half of this 572-page novel. We follow her angry descent into sex, drugs and prostitu- tion only to be reclaimed by an animal rights extremist whom she accompanies on raids on labs to rescue tortured inmates. The novel would have been improved if this lesson on animal rights had been severely cut.
Born Guilty (HarperCollins, £14.99), Reginald Hill's second novel starring his black private eye, Joe Sixsmith, who oper- ates improbably from Luton, has him jug- gling three cases. The central murder case concerns a boy found dead in a cardboard box outside the church in which Joe is singing Hayden's Creation. Joe is hired by an impoverished ex-colonial lady of the `Wait until my lawyer hears about this.' manor to find out who the boy was and how he died. His other two cases concern whether the school-teaching wife of the chief of police is seducing her female stu- dents and whether the grandfather of a streetwise young woman was really a wartime death-camp guard. Joe Sixsmith is an engaging fellow and the cases are enjoy- ably, if untaxingly, disentangled, but the subsidiary characters that make up Joe's world are unconvincing and under- developed. In the past Reginald Hill has written so many emotionally strong, com- plex stories that these light, comic turns he is now churning out are a little disappoint- ing. There is no meat there.
Simon Brett has come up with a corker of a story in Singled Out (Macmillan, £14.99). An over-controlled and controlling young woman decides to leave her husband to have a baby. She picks a handsome man in a bar, and spends a night of simulated passion in a Paddington hotel. During the night he becomes threatening and she humiliates him. The following day, without thinking anything of it, she reads that a girl, not unlike her in looks, has been murdered in Paddington.
She duly has her baby, who is beautiful, but she is horrified when her brother, a police detective, an unhappy and taciturn man working on the murder case, shows her a news item about a man who has killed himself in police custody and tells her that this was the murderer. It is a pic- ture of the father of her baby. It transpires that she and her brother suffered in child- hood from a brutal father. Her brother acknowledges the effect while she is deter- mined to overcome it through proficiency in work and life. When her son becomes 18 and goes to university it appears that heredity will out.
The plot is as good and potentially com- plex as anything that Ruth Rendell or Andrew Taylor .might come up with, and you do want to know what happens, but the novel is marred by a lack of emotional depth and the pieces in the final unravel- ling do not come together very convincing- ly.
Dr Kay Scarpetta, Patricia D. Cornwell's forensic medical officer investigates the murder of an 11-year-old girl in The Body Farm (Little Brown, £14.99). The evidence points to an escaped serial killer who enjoyed doing unspeakable things to his child victims, like peeling off some of their skin. When one of the investigating officers is found hanging in his house wearing a black bra belonging to the dead girl's beau- tiful mother and a jar of the child's missing skin among his food in the fridge, it seems, after all, as though they need look no fur- ther for the killer. Only Kay has doubts.
The main story is gripping, but Patricia D. Cornwell, who writes a trifle formalisti- cally, always has a sub-plot that engages somewhere along the line with the main one, The connection of this one to the main plot is completely absurd.
Previous page
