An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire (2017)

I discovered this book via an end-of-year crime novels list. I’d not come across the author before, and was particularly interested to see that An Isolated Incident had been shortlisted for Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 2017. The disarming, colloquial style grabbed me at page one and I dived straight in. I was brought up short almost immediately by a passage somewhere around the middle of the first chapter, in which one of the main characters, Chris, describes what it was like for her to begin puberty early, and the consequent sexual bullying she suffered at school:

My problem was my tits. I was too young when they sprouted and then they grew so fast. Eleven, twelve, thirteen and growing used to feeling naked, feeling rude because of the way boys and men – old men, teacher men, family men, strange men, friendly men – looked at me and found reasons to touch me and press against me and every now and then go for a sneaky grope. It set me apart from the other girls and made their mothers narrow their eyes and suggest I put on a jumper when it wasn’t cold and made the boys my age laugh and call out slut or showsyertits as I walked past. These giant tits that told everyone I was a scrubber and easy and trash.

The passage made me feel uncomfortable. The way Chris seemed so fixated on her own body – on herself as a sexual being – gave me an overpowering sense of mental claustrophobia. I felt alienated by it, and by her. I decided the book was not for me and switched over to reading something else.

The following day though I picked it up again. I decided I’d been too hasty, unfair to the writer. Also, something about the way I’d reacted – that sense of irritation, almost of outrage – had started to nag at me. What exactly was I annoyed about, and why? I began reading the book again from the beginning and this time when I got to the tits part I started to think about a girl I knew in primary school – let’s call her Mary – who had suffered exactly the same kind of bullying on account of her body.

Mary started her period when she was ten years old. I remember because it happened on a school trip. We were camping out in a field overnight, and although I’m sure the teachers did their best to guard Mary’s privacy, word soon raced round the group about what had happened. There was a lot of sniggering among the boys, terrified outrage among the girls. You have to remember that this was the 1970s – starting your period was something you kept secret and even something so simple and normal as buying sanitary products could be fraught with embarrassment. From that moment on, Mary was not the same as the rest of us, or not seen as the same. She was not ostracised exactly, though the effect on her must have been similar. She was set apart, talked about, whispered about. Weird rumours began to spring up about her home life, about her mother. All this because Mary had started her period early and had nascent breasts. I have no idea if any of those rumours about a troubled background were even remotely true – I have the feeling it was simply that Mary’s mum was bringing her up alone. What I do know is that from then on, Mary was branded the school bike. She was easy, she was dirty, she knew stuff she shouldn’t at her age. It was all right to call her a whore because that was what she was.

Reading Emily Maguire, I thought of what Mary must have been going through, and felt newly appalled. I never joined in with the shaming and bullying of Mary but I do remember I started to give her a wide berth, in my head as much as on the playground. To think of her as dangerous, to think, most of all, that she was ‘not like me’.

My own experience of pre-pubescence and adolescence was very different from Mary’s, the opposite of hers in fact, demeaning and psychologically damaging in other ways. As my memories of that time continued to unfold, I recalled an incident I hadn’t thought about for forty years. We were at middle school by then, just entering the age of who do you fancy? and covert assignations behind the bike sheds. I remembered bawling my eyes out at the school disco because a boy I was obsessed with didn’t seem to realise I even existed. I remembered how it was Mary who came up to me, who asked if I was all right, who handed me a tissue and then gave me a stark piece of advice: there’s nothing to cry about really, none of them matter.

Mary still looked older than the rest of us, with a careworn, hard-bitten resilience about her that makes me ache inside when I think about her now. What I felt at the time was surprise – surprise that Mary was actually an OK person, that she was intelligent and had things to say that were worth listening to. Most of all that she had spoken to me, that she had observed what was happening and wanted to help. That she had noticed me at all – the kind of person who barely figured in a world like hers – was a source of wonderment. I felt guilty and awed before her, and even at twelve years old I knew I had learned something.

*

What I did not begin to learn until much later was that in spite of the differences in how Mary and I were perceived, the same forces were being enacted upon the both of us. Rules that define how a woman should be and what behaviour is acceptable. Though the metrics were different, Mary was not acceptable and neither was I. As to what would have been acceptable, I now also understand that the answer is nothing. Whichever way you have of being a woman, there will be someone, somewhere, eager and willing to tell you what is wrong with it.

There has been progress in the years between then and now, but there are still remnants and echoes of those attitudes everywhere and not least in ourselves: we don’t talk about this stuff, we don’t need to talk about this stuff because it demeans us and reveals our vulnerability. Better barrel on through, pretend it doesn’t happen, or not any more, pretend we don’t hear.

These are the issues Emily Maguire is addressing in her work. The provocative nature of her writing is there to be just that: provocative. To provoke a reaction, to ask us to think about those reactions and what they say, not just about us as readers but the society in which we live and in which we read. I read the tits passage again. Still too on the nose for me, I thought. What I meant was, I wouldn’t have written it that way – too overtly polemical, not my style. But I felt glad Maguire had written it, that she’d had the guts to go for it. That it hadn’t been too on the nose for her.     

*

An Isolated Incident concentrates on the aftermath of a murder that takes place in the small Australian town of Strathdee. Situated on what was once the direct route between Sydney and Melbourne, Strathdee used to see a lot of through-traffic. Now that a bypass has been built, the town is less busy but still attractive for those looking for somewhere to drive off the freeway for a beer and a cheap overnight stay. Tourists see Strathdee as the quintessential Australian town, truckers like it for its convenience. The place is a bit run-down, suffers the usual outbreaks of petty crime from time to time but nothing out of the ordinary and when Bella Michaels, a care worker at an old people’s home, is found brutally murdered just off the freeway the whole town is shaken. Bella was like her name: pretty and popular, definitely not the type to take lifts from dodgy strangers.

For her older sister Chris, Bella’s death is so traumatic it is barely comprehensible. For Sydney journalist May, fed up with being overlooked and desperate to get into crime reporting, it is an opportunity. The narrative switches between the two women as they seek answers not only about Bella’s death but about the town in which it occurred and the people who knew her.

Yet solving the murder is not An Isolated Incident’s primary focus. Maguire is more interested in how people react to Bella’s death – not just her fictional townspeople, but us as readers – and the assumptions we make about why and how it happened. For Chris, her sister’s murder marks the destruction of the one stable facet of a life spent teetering on the edge of dysfunction. For May, Bella’s death will force her to reassess all the decisions she has made so far, both in her personal relationships and in her career. Maguire invites us to look at how these two women – women we have been conditioned to see as very dissimilar – are subject to similar pressures.  

Maguire is particularly persuasive about the appeal of both crime fiction and true crime narratives:

The squishy, reeking black truth of it was that reading about murder thrilled her, she supposed, in the exact same way that it thrilled the masses who snapped up true crime books in the millions and watched cheesy crime re-enactment shows and moody, gritty cable dramas. It was just so intimate.

Not only the act itself, though obviously that was, but the way that everything gets dug up and laid out in the aftermath. Homicide investigations – police ones and, sometimes even more so, media ones – open up private lives in an unprecedented way. Someone dies of natural causes, everyone’s all about respecting privacy. Someone gets murdered and it’s considered OK – helpful and responsible even – to delve into every email and text message, to lay out her underwear and porn collection, to note body hair removal habits, how often the sheets were changed, whether she preferred tampons to pads, condoms to an IUD. And not just the victim, either.  

She is also uncomfortably close to the mark on women’s experience of sex in the type of heterosexual relationships – that is to say, a lot of them – that are primarily about the exchange of power:

May switched off the light, lay back down, pressed hard on the bruises inside her thighs, blood surging at the memory of Chas’s stabbing hipbones. Fucking whore. Him, her. What was the point? The hunger for flesh, the crazed greed that made everything permissible, and then the shame. Not shame about the fucking, but about the need for it. Shame that in the lead-up moments it felt so important and now, lying alone in her shitty hotel bed, it seemed as exciting and urgent as double-stitching the dropped hem of her suit pants.

Some of Maguire’s literary contrivances – this is May’s book we’re holding – seem over-familiar. Her front-and-centre, expository manner of building an argument may finally be too explicit, too unsubtle for the novel’s own good. I remain undecided about that – there is an argument to be made that these statements need to be unsubtle, because they need, more than anything, to be heard. What is certain is that this is combative, energised writing and we should pay attention to it, especially those aspects of it that strike us as most uncomfortable.

FURTHER READING: Charlotte Wood on women’s anger. A fantastic piece, with some great suggestions for what to read next.

The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach translated by Anthea Bell (2012)

He’d always wanted to be a defence lawyer. During his work experience, he had been assigned to one of the large sets of chambers that specialised in commercial law. In the weeks after his exams, he received four invitations to go back there for interviews, but he didn’t go to any of them. Leinen didn’t like those large outfits where up to eight hundred lawyers might be employed. The young men there looked like bankers, had first class degrees and had bought cars they couldn’t afford; whoever could charge clients for the largest number of hours at the end of the week was the winner. The partners at such large practices already had two marriages under their belts, they wore yellow cashmere sweaters and checked trousers at weekends. Their world consisted of figures, posts on directorial boards, a consultancy contract with the Federal government and a never-ending succession of conference rooms, airport lounges and hotel lobbies. For all of them, it was a disaster if a case came to court: judges were too unpredictable. But that was exactly what Caspar Leiner wanted: to put on a robe and defend his clients. And now here he was.

Caspar Leinen is an idealistic young lawyer, recently graduated. When a well known industrialist is brutally murdered in his hotel bedroom, Leinen is called up from the duty roster to act as defence counsel. No one doubts that his client is guilty – Fabrizio Collini called the police himself after committing the murder, then sat passively in the hotel lobby, waiting to be arrested. But why did he kill Hans Meyer? Collini refuses to say anything in his own defence, and the difficulties surrounding the case are compounded when Caspar realises that the murdered man was previously known to him. Should there be a statute of limitation on acts of violence, and if so, who decides when such a statute should come into force? For Caspar Leinen, the Collini case could be the lucky break he needs to get his career started. But how far is he prepared to go in defending a client who killed the grandfather of a close childhood friend?

The Collini Case is a very personal book for Ferdinand von Schirach, who himself worked as a defence lawyer before becoming a writer, and whose grandfather was Baldur von Schirach, a prominent Nazi and leader of the Hitler Youth movement. In talking about the background to the novel, von Schirach recalls how learning about his grandfather’s ‘other life’ altered his whole outlook and understanding of who he was and where he came from. He was twelve years old at the time he first saw a photograph of his grandfather in his Nazi uniform. Up until then his grandfather had been simply that – a grandfather, a kind, cultured man who enjoyed the opera and spending time with his family. How could such a person also have been responsible for organising the transport to concentration camps of thousands of Jews?

Ferdinand von Schirach published his first book, Crime, in 2009 at the age of forty-five. Crime, and its 2010 follow-up Guilt are described and sold as fiction but are in fact collections of short vignettes, drawing heavily from incidents and cases encountered by von Schirach in the course of his legal career. Von Schirach’s writing in these stories is cool, controlled, elegant, and I was excited to see what he would do with a longer-form narrative. Von Schirach’s books have achieved bestseller status in Germany, and I felt certain that the personal experiences he was drawing on would be bound to add extra immediacy to what already had the potential to be a compelling storyline.

In fact, I was disappointed. In Crime and Guilt, von Schirach seems to have hit upon the perfect vehicle for both his particular knowledge and his way of conveying it. I would not call von Schirach’s writing bloodless – I would rather say pared-back, sparse, economical. Articulate and engaging without a single word wasted. Time and again while reading The Collini Case I found myself thinking what a brilliant lawyer this man must be and maybe this is the problem. He is so used to holding things back, to slanting the facts in favour of a particular argument – the art of omission. For the writer of short stories, these habits are positively advantageous! Over the longer distance though, this curious inability to let rip can leave the reader feeling uninvolved and unimpressed.

The Collini Case is itself a very short novel – you can read it in two hours. The facts of the case are conveyed with clarity and intelligence. Away from the court room itself, the short descriptive passages are subtly evocative, possessing an almost Chekhovian pathos. Yet in spite of all this, I was left feeling that the author has absolutely no feeling for drama. Every opportunity for conflict within the narrative is neatly sidestepped – the prosecution lawyer Mattinger is a bit of a posh bastard but a bit of a mentor too and by the end he’s offering to take Leiner on as a partner, Meyer’s granddaughter Johanna (sister of Caspar’s childhood friend Philip, conveniently deceased) is shocked and horrified when she first hears that Caspar is going to defend Meyer’s murderer, but ends up understanding completely, helping Caspar find the information that will posthumously reveal her grandfather as a top Nazi and becomes Caspar’s lover into the bargain. Even Collini [SPOILER ALERT!] conveniently commits suicide, meaning that the trial is discontinued and everyone wins.

I wanted more! I wanted the version of The Collini Case that in its length and complexity and depth resembles Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and it felt all the more frustrating to me, to see how easily such a version could have been achieved. All the material is there – just none of the substance. The Collini Case as it exists reads like the outline of a novel, the pitch for a movie rather than the thing itself.

There’s also a curiously dated tone to some of it. I can’t help wondering if von Schirach now regrets the inclusion of this passage, for example:

The press printed stories about Mattinger’s trials in the past. One was regarded as legendary: a man’s wife had accused him of raping her. There was all the evidence that might have been expected, haematomas on the inside of her thighs, his sperm in her vagina, consistent statements to the police. The man had two previous convictions for actual bodily harm. The presiding judge questioned the wife, he was thorough about it, he spent two hours going over every detail in her statement. Counsel for the public prosecutor’s office had no questions. But Mattinger didn’t believe the woman. His first question was, ‘Would you care to admit that you’ve been lying?’ He began questioning her at eleven in the morning, and the court adjourned for the day at six in the evening… In the end the wife spent fifty-seven days on the witness stand, obliged to answer his questions. On the morning of the fifty-eighth day she gave way and admitted that, out of jealousy, she had wanted to see her husband behind bars.

As a sample case to demonstrate the high moral standing and all-round brilliance of your prosecution lawyer, I think it would be fair to say that this is not the best choice. And remember, Mattinger is meant to be a good guy. (Worrying to think that this novel was written less than a decade ago.)

I liked the court sections, the fine detail of legal practice. This is clearly the arena von Schirach finds most comfortable and it’s interesting to note that it is precisely here – where there might have been a danger of dryness – that the text feels most fully formed. The novel as a whole though needs more drama and more danger, more waywardness.

There is interest and even some pleasure to be had from The Collini Case, but for a story of WW2 atrocities, family secrets and the legacy of violence, its power to excite emotion feels curiously constrained.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor translated by Sophie Hughes (2020)

“This is the story of a murder, but it’s not a murder mystery in any traditional sense.” (Sophie Hughes, Granta January 2020)

…and Brando felt himself choke with emotion, felt his skin prickle with goosebumps, and for a moment, with an almost cramp-like sensation in his gut, he wondered if maybe he hadn’t spat out the whole pill, if it was all just a hallucination, a strange nightmare, a bad trip brought on by bombing too much cheap aguardiente, by smoking too much weed and spending too long cooped up in that horrible house with that crazy terrifying bitch. He never told anyone how much Luismi’s voice had moved him, and he would rather have died than admit that the real reason he kept going to the Witch’s parties was to hear Luismi sing.

In the rural Mexican township of La Matosa, a murder has been committed. The body of the Witch, a person locally notorious for her occult powers and for the treasure she has supposedly been hoarding in her crumbling mansion, has been discovered submerged beneath the filthy waters of an irrigation canal. The police are summoned but no one will admit to knowing anything and in any case, this is not a story about a police investigation. What we get instead is less clear cut and more stubbornly resistant to judgement. Melchor’s characters tell their own tales, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping. Sentences sprawl over several pages, unspooling in a welter of fury and pathos and technicolor profanity. By the end, we will know what happened, yet there is little sense of closure. The violence that led to the Witch’s murder will not blow itself out along with the hurricane. Rather it is a manifestation of the despair that is the inheritance of these deprived communities, a witch’s curse.

The best way to engage with this book is to give yourself up to it completely. As with Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Feebleminded, both of which I read last year, I found the only way I could fully appreciate the beauty, the madness and the pure technical mastery of Hurricane Season was to immerse myself in the text for an hour or more at a stretch, letting myself become prey to its rhythms, its structure, its firebomb language. I saw a review somewhere that likened the novel’s structure to that of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, in which the time stream works backwards from the murder to its origins, and I thought that an insightful comparison. A second, perhaps inevitable parallel can be drawn with Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You might start this book wondering what is going on, who these people are and how they relate to one another. I would encourage you to keep going. The more you read, the more matters clarify, and – as with any more conventional detective story – there is much satisfaction to be gained from seeing the crime in context, to solving the terrible mystery of how and why it happened.

… and just then his telephone buzzed again and, once again, it was the kid, now telling him that he’d got hold of some cash, that he’d spot Munra’s petrol if he did him this one solid of taking him to a job, by which the witness understood that his stepson had required the services of taking him to a specified location where he could obtain the money to continue drinking, a proposal the witness accepted, meaning that inside his closed-top Lumina van (colour grey-blue, model 1991, with vehicle registration plates from the state of Texas roger, golf, X-ray, 511), he drove to the agreed-upon meeting point, namely, a row of benches in the park facing the Palacio Municipal de Villa, where he met his stepson, who was accompanied by two subjects, one of whom was known by the nickname of Willy, occupation VHS retailer in Villa market, roughly thirty-five to forty years of age, long black greying hair, dressed in his customary rock-band T-shirt and black combat boots…

In the fourth part of Roberto Bolano’s monumental 2004 novel 2666, Bolano details the deaths of 112 Mexican women that took place in and around Ciudad Juarez in the 1990s. The women were almost all from working class backgrounds, and heavily exploited. The police had notoriously little success in solving these murders or bringing anyone to justice. Hurricane Season can be read almost as an extra, previously missing chapter of 2666, a companion piece in which the backstories of some of the victims are explored in detail. As with Bolano, part of the power of Melchor’s writing resides in how un-polemical it is, at least outwardly. In asking her readers not to look away from the facts of this case, she reveals the murky no-man’s-land between good and evil. In acknowledging the inspiration given to her by journalists working on the front line of investigative reporting, she reminds us of the sometimes terrible cost of telling these stories in the real world.

Hurricane Season is one of those books you start out feeling frustrated with and end up being changed by. The moment I finished reading, I looped back round to the beginning of the book, sure in the knowledge that every word and connection that might have escaped me first time around would now be revealed in all its deadly clarity. What a rewarding, provoking, enriching, death-defying firestorm of a book this is. I feel privileged to have read it. For anyone looking for a crime story that does not shy away from the true nature of violence and its consequences, that refuses detective fiction’s reassuring archetypes in favour of something more challenging, more formally ambitious and more profound, I would recommend Hurricane Season unreservedly.

Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe (2019)

Detective stories make good reading material for misfits. They teach you that being overlooked can be an advantage, that when your perspective is slightly askew from the mainstream, you notice things that other people don’t. If you imagine yourself as an investigator, you have an excuse to hover outside the social circle, watching its dynamics unfold. You’re untouched and you’re untouchable. Your weirdness becomes a kind of superpower.

I don’t have enough good things to say about this book. I’d go so far as to say that Savage Appetites is a book that everyone with an interest in true crime should read. As compelling as any novel, Monroe’s examination of the true crime phenomenon and in particular its attraction for women is as personal as it is forensic, as immersive as it is questioning. I’m not normally in the habit of marking up my books, but by the time I’d finished reading, my copy of Savage Appetites was peppered with little stars and underlinings. I loved this book unreservedly. I emerged from it feeling energised and inspired.

Monroe begins her documentary experiment with a simple yet immediately intriguing thesis. The women who find themselves attracted to true crime (be it books, podcasts, or documentaries – usually it’s all three) tend to fall into four broad groups: the detective (those who enjoy the investigative process and the sense of knowing that comes with it), the victim (those who feel an affinity with and want to draw attention to victims’ untold stories through possible parallels with their own lives), the defender (those with a powerful sense of justice who want to see justice done), and more disturbingly the killer (those who see aspects of themselves reflected in the marginalised, alienated and socially inadequate individuals who have committed murder).

Each of the four main parts of Savage Appetites is devoted to an individual or set of individuals who exemplifies their category. In the case of the detective, Monroe investigates the life of Frances Glessner Lee, the creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and dubbed by some as the mother of forensic medicine. In the victim category we meet Lisa Statman, an assistant film director whose fascination with Sharon Tate became so obsessive she moved into the guesthouse behind the infamous ‘murder house’ on Cielo Drive. This chapter is particularly insightful on the subject of the changes in attitudes towards crime that saw themselves enacted in the US prison system through the 1980s and through to the present day:

Studies of victimization find over and over again how similar victims and perpetrators are, but in the new rhetoric of victimhood, the world was divided up more neatly. A community of actual and potential victims, ‘us’, was pitted against actual and potential offenders, ‘them,’ a division along lines that were far from arbitrary… Crime isn’t worse, but it feels worse. Something feels worse, at least. It’s not that hard to imagine how such a thing might happen. How, if your world felt as if it were changing underneath your feet, if your life felt precarious and out of your control, and then you heard a good story that explained why that was, a story that placed the blame on a clearly defined bad guy, and then you kept hearing that story over and over, it might indeed begin to seem true.

The theme of law enforcement and its increasing politicisation continues in the third part of the book, which examines the notorious West Memphis Three case from the point of view of Lorri Davis, the woman who became so affected by the miscarriage of justice against Damien Echols that she turned over her whole life to the fight for a retrial. It’s an unusual and electrifying story, not least because stories like it, in which women devote themselves entirely to the cause of a ‘wronged man’ so often turn out badly, not least for the woman. In Lorri’s case, Monroe paints a portrait of an unusual and driven individual without shirking away from the emotional and psychological damage still inherent in her situation. The vast folly of America’s ‘Satanic Panic’ and the injustices it perpetrated still chills the blood – and also reminds us that we had our own version of this damaging episode here in the UK.

The most disturbing chapter deals with the subject of online serial and spree killer ‘fandom’, channeled through the bizarre fantasies of Ayn Rand and the case of Lisa Souvannarath and her failed plan to instigate a mass shooting. Monroe is brilliant and unsparing in her analysis of online fringe communities (such as the ‘Columbiners’), their possible motivations and insidious rhetoric as well as questions around gun control and increased surveillance. It is in this part of the book that Monroe interrogates herself most keenly, examining her own abiding fascination with true crime narratives:

Perhaps part of me felt as though I should have been [on trial]. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I, like Lindsay, had internalized the idea that murderers were fascinating. Over the years I’ve read thousands of pages about various varieties of Killer (Zodiac, Green River, BTK, Lonely Hearts) and Strangler (Hillside, Boston); don’t even get me started on the time I’ve devoted to goofy little Charlie Manson. My brothers can have entire conversations where they’re just tossing sports statistics back and forth; certain friends and I can do the same thing with serial murderers.

She chooses – rightly, I think – to end her study on a positive note, however:

Sensational crime stories can have an anesthetizing effect… but we don’t have to use them to turn our brains off. Instead, we can use them as opportunities to be more honest about our appetites – and curious about them, too. I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.

Rachel Monroe is one of a number of incredible true crime writers and investigative journalists – Sarah Weinman, Emma Eisenberg – who also happen to be women. Together, they’re helping to move true crime writing in a bold new direction, interrogating their subjects even as they report them. Asking us why we read what we read, why we are interested. I reiterate that I cannot recommend Savage Appetites highly enough, and needless to say I’m already hungry for whatever Rachel Monroe writes next.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m classic Detective.)

Countdown City by Ben H. Winters (2013)

There are a million things I might be doing other than putting in overtime to make right one Bucket List abandonment, to heal Martha Milano’s broken heart. But this is what I do. It’s what makes sense to me, what has long made sense. And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.

This is the second novel in Winters’s Last Policeman trilogy. I think you could come to this book without having read The Last Policeman itself, but I’d recommend beginning at the beginning because the beginning is good! In an alternate present, Earth is living through what might prove to be the final year of human civilisation. A ten-mile-wide asteroid, Maia, is hurtling towards our planet. According to almost all scientific calculations, impact is now certain. The resulting ‘nuclear winter’ will block out the sunlight, making life impossible for all but the most basic organisms.

As the end looms ever closer, society is beginning to break down. While some choose to soldier on as best they can, many people have abandoned their former lives completely, taking up with new partners, resorting to a life of crime, racing across the world in order to tick off items on their personal bucket list before it’s too late. Health, safety and business services have been wound down to the minimum as staffing levels fall. The police have given up on solving crimes, concentrating instead on basic law enforcement. It is against this background that we meet our quiet hero, erstwhile police detective Henry Palace. With the entire detective division stood down, Hank’s services are no longer required. But as one of the ‘soldier on’ brigade, his response to the impending catastrophe is: business as usual. When an old friend, Martha Milano, begs him to find her missing husband, he feels he has no option but to take up the challenge, especially as the husband in question used to be a cop.

Brett Cavatone was one of the best: hardworking, fair, incorruptible. He had promised Martha he would be with her until the end. Why would he disappear, and where would he go? Most are sceptical of Hank’s quest – it seems clear that Brett, like so many others, has run away to another life. But for Hank there are clear indications that Martha’s husband is not your typical ‘bucket lister’. When his enquiry stalls, he turns to his wayward sister Nico for help. As his sole remaining family member, Nico is precious to Hank, but their relationship in recent months has not been easy. Will the mystery of Brett’s disappearance help reunite them?

*

There are books that are great – books that change one’s thinking, realign one’s ambitions, achieve a standard of excellence that forms a definitive statement about literature itself. These books will be different for every reader but I think most readers would agree that such works are rare, that rarity, in a sense, is the point of them. Less rare but equally important in cementing a lifelong love of reading are those books that are good. Good as in well crafted, solidly conceived, intelligent, entertaining, thought-provoking, literate and compelling. As with the great books, we will all have our favourites, our own reasons for choosing them. Many of these good books fall into the various categories of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, espionage and of course crime.

A good genre novel – a novel in which plot is the driver but not the whole, in which style is not the overall arbiter but is not absent either, in which action is driven by character and the writer is driven by a love of the written word – is a thing of rare beauty. Reading a novel such as William McIlvaney’s Laidlaw or Ruth Rendell’s A Demon in My View gives me intense pleasure because of how well made it is, and I will often find myself revelling in that well-madeness – the attention to detail, the skilfully-turned sentences, the love of story – as much as I might revel in the passionate expressionism of Roberto Bolano or the linguistic or conceptual fireworks of Nabokov or Borges. My pleasure in Ben H. Winters’s Last Policeman books has been driven by this – their well-madeness, the author’s respect for the reader’s intelligence, the joy of a good story, well told.

Part of what I loved about The Last Policeman was the way the book worked equally well as a police procedural and as a science fiction novel. This proved equally true of the follow-up, Countdown City, with Winters’s knowledge and love of both genres clearly evident. I will definitely be returning to read the final novel in the series, World of Trouble, but owing to present circumstances, that might not be for a while.

*

Strange though this may seem to some, I initially picked up Countdown City because of the corona crisis. It felt peculiarly like the right time to read about an honest cop fighting for justice in a world that was going to hell. I was therefore surprised to find how deeply this novel affected me. Our situation is not Hank’s situation (thank goodness) but I found it almost uncanny, how much the imagery in Countdown City seemed to reflect aspects of what we have seen across the world in the past few weeks: the accelerating pace of change, the actualisation of situations and behaviours that would have been inconceivable just three months ago. Most of all the fragility of what we accept as normality, how normality can be dismantled literally overnight:

Ruth-Ann, ancient and gray-headed and sturdy, stops by to clear our dishes and slide ashtrays under the cigars, and everybody nods thanks. Besides the oatmeal and the cheese, the main refreshment she can offer is tea, because its chief ingredient is water, which for now is still running out of the taps. Estimates vary on how long the public water supply will last now that the electricity is down for good. It depends on how much is in the reserve tanks, it depends on whether the Department of Energy has prioritized our city generators over other sections of the Northeast – it depends, it depends, it depends…

There is nothing particularly new in Countdown City. As the current proliferation of book lists and think pieces and memes reminds us, the imagery of dystopia and apocalypse is so familiar it is becoming shop soiled. Yet there is something in the measured tone, the matter-of-factness of Winters’s rendition of these archetypes that feels distinctive, and distinctly uncomfortable as we encounter barely amended versions of them in our own locked-down lives. Hank Palace is the ideal narrator: compassionate whilst remaining objective, he is used to taking note of the details, of observing people in their physical environment and their mental distress. Whilst being under considerable strain himself, he is able to analyse a situation from all angles, to find empathy with all, even with those whose actions are dangerous and selfish:

We cut across the room, Houdini and I, weave through the big ungainly piles of take-what-you-want scattered and heaped on blankets in the middle of the room. Broken shells of computers and phones, empty buckets and deflated soccer balls, big picked-over piles of the kind of useless articles once found in pharmacies and big-box stores: greeting cards, reading glasses, celebrity magazines. The really valuable objects are in the manned stalls: dairy goods and smoked meats, cans and can openers, bottles of water and bottles of soda. It’s all barter and exchange, though some stalls still have prices posted, dating from the peak of hyperinflation, before the dollar economy collapsed… One huge individual in a camouflage hunting jacket stands in the center of his uncluttered stall, silent and serious, under a sign reading simply GENERATORS.

I think what has affected me most about reading Countdown City precisely now is the way it reminds us of how, with just a few unlucky throws of the dice, the fantastical could become the quotidian. Hank Palace is not battling zombies, and although he is seriously injured by a sniper at one point, he does not shoot anyone himself. The violence that occurs in Countdown City does not consist of orchestrated set pieces, or bad guys gunning down bad guys in a final battle – mainly it’s just ordinary people, terrified because their world is being held to ransom, the medical supplies are running out and there’s no food on the shelves, let alone toilet rolls…

With his Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters has taken the police procedural in a fascinating direction. His writing is solid, articulate, knowing and his plotting is a joy. For anyone looking to make the acquaintance of a compelling detective character without the histrionics or the drink problem, Hank Palace is your man. I can thoroughly recommend Countdown City – though maybe you’d be best to set it aside for a sunnier day.

I have just been reading about the death of an elderly lady, Hilda Churchill, from Covid-19, just nine days short of her 109th birthday. Hilda was born in 1911 and was a survivor of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. She had not been well in any case, but in the photo of her posted widely online, her life and spirit still shine through. It is through moments like these that we attempt to grasp the enormity of what is happening.

Hilda was my gran’s name. Fare well, Hilda.

I am unable to visit my mother while we are in lockdown, even though she now lives so close to us i can literally run to her house. Soon after my mother moved to the island, we started a complete rewatch of Inspector Morse, beginning at the beginning with Endeavour. This created something of a whiplash effect as the production values and self-awareness of the ‘prequel’ turn out to be streets ahead of those early episodes of Morse. Remember how sophisticated and complex the series seemed when it first hit our screens back in 1987? Turns out it was sexist and racist, with Morse himself suffering from more than a touch of the Alex Salmonds. Shame. Still, we soldiered on and things improved. We’d just seen Who Killed Harry Field when the lockdown was announced, and this Friday should have seen us having supper together and watching Greeks Bearing Gifts, a classic episode starring Martin Jarvis that I know so well I can quote whole sections of it. This is heartland Morse, the final three seasons in which the canon was so well established it set the standard for TV detective shows for years to come.

Everyone will by now have their personal list of stuff they can’t wait to do when the lockdown ends (it still feels surreal even writing those words, to realise how rapidly this situation has developed a language and iconography of its own, a set of meanings and conditions we have come to accept as our lived reality) and one of the things on mine will be getting back to Morse, hopefully over a curry and a large glass of wine.

In the meantime, and to fill that Morse-shaped hole I thought I’d unleash a blogging project to run for the duration of the lockdown and entitled (somewhat dubiously) Corona Crime Spree. The aim is simple: to read and blog a crime novel every week. To make this as interesting as possible I will aim to diversify my reading within the genre, taking in writers from a wide variety of backgrounds and showcasing radically different approaches to writing crime.

So, first up:

The Golden Key, by Marian Womack (2020)

A mash-up of Golden Age detective fiction and Victorian gothic, The Golden Key introduces us to the character of Helena Walton Cisneros, a resourceful and fearless young woman who poses as a medium in order to carry out her real work as a detective. Helena has an almost uncanny talent for finding lost things and lost people. Her services have been engaged by Lady Matthews, an ageing gentlewoman still tormented by the disappearance of her three nieces in an unexplained incident twenty years before.

Meanwhile, a young man named Samuel Moncrieff is pursued by nightmares concerning a ruined Tudor mansion in the mist-shrouded emptiness of the Norfolk fens, and Eliza Waltraud, a scholar working on a biography of the climate scientist Eunice Foote, grieves the absence of her lover, Mina. Only time will show how these characters are connected, and how their stories unfold.

The first thing to say about The Golden Key is how richly textured and intelligent the writing is. Some readers may remember my unreserved admiration for Womack’s debut collection Lost Objects, with its distilled prose, political urgency and original imagery. There is a slightly looser feel to the writing in The Golden Key, as befits the longer story arc. The imagery and even the sense of place are different too, drawing on the historical genres that have inspired this novel, yet Womack has a genuine feel for the Gothic and her talent for summoning an atmosphere or describing a place is keenly on display. Here she is writing about dolls (you can imagine how this resonated with me):

She looked through the window at the abandoned doll, so like an abandoned boat after a flood. The glass gave her back her own reflection, paler than usual, the untamed wheat-blond hair, the tiny curls stuck in an unimaginable tangle. She hadn’t taken care of herself properly in weeks, and didn’t plan to do so. Who cared? She looked no better than the doll, she thought. Secretly, she felt happy about the doll’s fate. She despised them. The French Jumeau, with its sad porcelain face, long eyelashes drawn on its forehead, and its real, dead hair. The mechanical baby from the Steiner house, the most valuable thing in that cottage, although none of its occupants were aware of the fact. The distracted grimace of the little blond doll, bought in Paris in another lifetime.

And here she is describing the atmosphere of The Golden Key’s fenland setting:

They climbed down from the pony and cart into a reed swamp. On the other side of the water stood the ruins. There were a crumbling heap of derelict constructions that looked as if they had been washed ashore by the tide. They did not look as if they had ever been standing in any way or form. The island resembled a nowhere place, neither land nor sea, and it had probably been like that for centuries for the church to end up like it was now, a collection of stones scattered by the hand of God over that mound. It had happened, eventually, a gale that lasted several days, which submerged this bit of land entirely, cracking the stone walls forever, breaking the windows, collapsing the little tower as if it had been made of gingerbread. And then the church had fallen, and the bell had stopped tolling forever.

There is writing like this in abundance, at times menacing, at times merely elegiac but always full of feeling. You can sense Womack’s personal investment in every page of this story, a brooding unease with the status quo that forms The Golden Key’s most cogent link with the (mostly) near-future or alternate world stories in Lost Objects.

As a detective story, The Golden Key shows a lot of promise. The mysterious disappearance of the three Matthews sisters is just the first indication of how badly things have gone awry in this particular corner of England: as Helena continues her investigation, she soon discovers other, similar disappearances of children in the same area, most of which seem to be connected with the ghastly visitations of a mysterious vagrant who may not be quite what they seem. Looking into the circumstances surrounding the confinement of Sam Moncrieff’s fiancee to an asylum, she is mystified and concerned to find that there seems to be no record of Sam’s birth or parentage. Who exactly is he, and where is he from? Then there is Lady Matthews herself: what is her interest in the crumbling ruins, and what does she know about the origins of the strange sickness afflicting persons in their vicinity?

Throughout much of the novel I was anticipating a scientific explanation to these mysteries, the kind of ‘banishing of the ghosts’ that became fashionable during the heyday of Gothic romances (we might think back to Sarah Phelps’s recent adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse to find a fine example of exactly that tendency). Womack goes her own way though, and although science sits front and centre in The Golden Key, the novel’s core inspiration is never far away, the numinous leaking through into the rational, infecting the entire narrative with its uncanny light.

If The Golden Key has a problem at all, it is one of structure. There is so much going on in this book – at least three key plot strands and as many subsidiaries – that a firm through-line is essential for the reader to keep a handle on everything. For me at least this sense of order is missing, with the narrative threatening at times to spiral out of control. Important revelations are made in a perfunctory sentence, new characters introduced without warning and seemingly without reason. One of the most important aspects of Golden Age detective fiction – and an area in which the best of its authors excelled – lies in preparing the reader for what is to follow, setting up the mystery in such a way as to involve the reader’s active participation in its solution. In The Golden Key, readers are too often teased with the possibility of this kind of collaborative problem-solving, only to have it snatched away at the last moment by a change in direction or the introduction of a new plot thread.

If anything, The Golden Key suffers from a surfeit of riches. There is enough material here for two or even three novels, all of it interesting, compelling, and beautifully imagined. I often found myself wishing that Womack had concentrated more on Helena, for example, and kept Eliza’s story in reserve. Her obsession with Eunice Foote, her broken relationship with Mina – these are important and fascinating subjects and the framework of the narrative as it stands simply does not allow them the time and space to be properly explored. Eliza deserves an entire novel to herself!

The Golden Key is an alluring and deeply personal text, consolidating and expanding Womack’s achievement in Lost Objects. If the narrative is overstretched in places, this is amply compensated for by the writer’s talent, passion and originality. Here’s hoping we see more of Helena in the future!