A cut and dried case?
Andrew Taylor DEATH UNDER THE DRYER by Simon Brett Macmillan, £16.99, pp. 300, ISBN 9781405041386 © £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The modern crime novel tends to be a serious matter involving body parts and serial killers, sometimes with a spot of social analysis thrown in for good measure. It was not always like this, and Simon Brett is among the handful of distinguished contemporary crime writers who remind us of those far-off days of innocence when detective stories were meant to be fun. Death Under the Dryer is the latest title in Brett's Tethering mysteries'. Fethering, a fortunately fictional seaside town in West Sussex, has the sort of murder rate that used to distinguish Miss Marple's village of St Mary's Mead. It has two resident sleuths, ladies of a certain age whom one character describes as Fethering's very own Marple Twins. Their personalities, however, are quite different. The cautious Carole, a retired civil servant at the Home Office, is divorced and waiting anxiously for the birth of her first grandchild. Jude, a plump alternative therapist, has credit cards in several names and welcomes the world with open arms.
Carole rashly decides to have her hair done at Connie's Clip Joint, only to discover the strangled body of Kyra, Connie's pretty young trainee, in a back room. A dozen red roses, a handful of beer cans and an empty vodka bottle complete the scene. Kyra's boyfriend Nathan Locke has disappeared, and is naturally the principal suspect. The police, who play an almost invisible part in the subsequent investigation, appear to be stumped.
Carole and Jude are made of sterner stuff. Fortunately everyone involved in the case is more than willing to discuss it with them. It is not long before they have discovered that Kyra's elderly father, a ferociously stern Czech, did not like Kyra to have boyfriends. Connie's ex-husband Martin and his current wife Martina (herself of Czech extraction) own a prosperous chain of hairdressers. They previously employed Kyra and there are hints of possibly criminal misbehaviour.
Nathan's curiously self-sufficient family inhabit a bizarre sub-Tolkien fantasy world controlled by Nathan's complacent Uncle Rowley, a man with an uncertain grip on reality and a penchant for anagrams. Is Theo, Connie's gay stylist, living a double life — or even a triple one? Fuelled with Chilean Chardonnay,Carole and Jude follow the tangled thread of the investigation as far as Worthing, Brighton and even Cornwall before it ends, as it began, in Connie's Clip Joint.
Among crime writers, Simon Brett is in some ways a wolf in sheep's clothing. On one level, Death Under the Dryer is a skilful and entertaining cosy mystery which oozes clues, red herrings and flights, or perhaps hops, of deductive reasoning. But there's also more than a hint of self-parody, as well as some very good jokes. The novel is crammed with spiky insights into people and the strange games they play. The Lockes, for example, emerge as a truly creepy family that takes its game literally — 'a philosophy, a life system!' Brett's alternative reality, on the other hand, is firmly anchored in human nature and is essentially benign. Thank heaven, he reminds us, part of England remains for ever Fethering.
Andrew Taylor's latest novel is Naked to the Hangman (Hodder & Stoughton).
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