Author: Mark Bailey

Peter James – Want You Dead

UK Hardback: 400 pages (June 2014) Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780230760585

UK EPUB: (June 2014) Publisher: Pan ISBN: 9780230760615

UK Paperback: 400 pages (October 2014) Publisher: Pan ISBN: 9781447270287

Red Westwood meets Bryce Laurent through an online dating agency. He seems to be handsome, charming and rich and there is an instant attraction. But as their relationship continues the truth about his past and the dark side to his personality begin to emerge. Everything he has told Red about himself is a lie and her infatuation with him turns to terror. But Bryce is obsessed with her, and he intends to destroy everything and everyone she has ever known and loved – and then her too . . .

As usual with Peter James’ Roy Grace novels this is crime fiction for those who like to have well-rounded detectives with a believable private life. The life of Roy Grace is advancing on slowly from book to book so there is very little gap between titles – this means Roy Grace has a long time to go until retirement.

The short snappy chapters are still there that are a Peter James trademark (120 chapters in 400 or so pages) are still there so you find it hard to put it down – you do tend to think I have time for just one more chapter.

This one probably could be read as a starter as the links to the past are a bit less prominent that in previous books but if you are reading the series in sequence then there is a cliff hanger at the end to hook you for the next book.

Overall, any Roy Grace novel by Peter James will always float to the top of my to-be-read pile for the foreseeable future.

My copy was provided by the publishers, Pan Macmillan, via Netgalley.

All on a Summers Day by John Wainwright

(First published in 1981)

About the author

John William Wainwright was born in Leeds in 1921. After military service, he joined the West Riding Constabulary as a Police Constable in 1947. After earning himself a law degree by distance learning in 1956, he tried writing a crime novel (Death in a Sleeping City) in 1965 which was published by Collins Crime Club. He left the police force either in 1966 (according to Wikpedia and his biography of his years in the police – Wainwright’s Beat), 1967 (according to the back cover of some of his books) or 1969 (according to The St James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers) and became a full-time novelist typically writing an average of three books a year until 1984 – 78 crime novels, a short-story collection and four non-fiction works in total.

Brainwash (1977) is probably his most popular novel and was loosely filmed as Garde à vue (1981) and Under Suspicion (2000). Cul-de-sac (1984) was also well received and was endorsed by Georges Simenon who defined it “an unforgettable novel”.

Most of his novels are police procedurals but he also wrote suspense thrillers, spy novels and legal thrillers.

Wainwright died in 1995, a few months after the publication of his last novel, The Life and Times of Christmas Calvert… Assassin.

All of his output is currently out of print.

Plot

All on a Summer’s Day chronicles twenty-four hours in the life of a Police station in the north of England (somewhere in Yorkshire from various geographic distances given) and is quite similar in conception to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here published a decade earlier in 1971.

It starts at midnight on Friday 26^th June at Sopworth police station – it seems like a quiet night but before Saturday 27^th June 2 police men will be maimed, 2 people will be murdered and there will be a small riot at a local public house.

 

Review

This is very much a traditional police procedural but it is highly character driven, primarily by Detective Chief Superintendent Robert Blayde (who makes his first of 3 appearances in the foreground in novels by John Wainwright who moved characters on and off certain stage within a confined realistic world in many of his novels) who appears a quarter of the novel in. Blayde is a very old school copper (even for the time this was written) and is the leader of the ‘circus’ – the team of specialist policeman and civilian support who dealt with the more serious crime in the area.

Wainright introduces you to each of his main characters briefly but with sufficient depth that you get to know them and understand their motivation. The 3 main intertwining stories (the murders, the maimings and the inter-gang) rivalry are all well described and tied up by the end of the novel.

What makes Wainright different for me and why I think he is such a good read as that he knew this world as an ex-copper and understood the politics and interpersonal interactions within it only too well (read Wainwright’s Beat for a cynical view of the moral and social complications of policing in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s).

If I am not convincing you that this is worth a read, then note that this was one of HRF Keatings 100 Best Crime and Mystery Books as of 1987.

Wycliffe and the Pea Green Boat by W. J. Burley

(First published in 1975; The 6th of 22 novels in the Wycliffe series)

About the author

William John Burley was born in Falmouth in 1914. Married with two sons, he worked as an engineer before a change of direction led him to study zoology as a mature student at Balliol College, Oxford. Afterwards, he taught biology at Newquay School.

WJ Burley began his professional writing career with books about an amateur detective (Henry Pym) before deciding to concentrate on the investigations of a professional policeman (Wycliffe). This series gradually trended away from being a pure police procedural to stories about a policeman with a more psychological approach.

In The St James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Burley summed up his work thus:

‘Most of my books are set in the far southwest, and they are concerned with the tensions which arise within small groups of people who live or work together in close proximity – the family in a country house; the partners in a family business; the people living in a village street or town square. My criminals are never professionals but ordinary people who feel driven by repressed emotions of fear, hatred or jealousy to commit crimes which in other circumstances they would find unthinkable. In my more recent books I have used actual locations in Cornwall and Devon, confusing the topography slightly in order to avoid the risk of seeming to represent actual people.’

The quality of the books (along with the TV adaption with Jack Shepherd being of as good a quality although divergent from the books for practical reasons – the act of compressing a Burley novel done to 50 minutes proved almost impossible) have kept the Wycliffe books in print unlike the rest of Burleys work.

W J Burley died in 2002.

Plot

Cedric Tremain is charged with murdering his father by booby-trapping his fishing boat. However despite all the locals are agreed that he is an unlikely murderer, the case against him is strong as he has motive, opportunity and know-how as there is some hard circumstantial evidence against him. But Chief Superintendent Wycliffe has a strong sense that something about the case just doesn’t fit. As he quietly continues his investigations a confusing picture emerges. Twenty years ago Cedric’s cousin was convicted of strangling his girlfriend and served fourteen years of a commuted death sentence. While the wheels of justice grind on Wycliffe breaks his holiday to search for a link between past and present to solve more than one murder.

Review

This is an interesting Wycliffe story for 2 reasons.

Firstly, the TV version almost entirely drops the B-plot – the problem of plot condensing is really apparent here and you can see why after this episode the production team opted entirely for original stories using the established characters from the start of series 2 onwards.

Secondly, I feel this is one of the first of the true Wycliffe books as Wycliffe acts slowly & deliberately teasing the case together and getting people to show their guilt themselves. He functions with very little support from a team here relying almost entirely on his knowledge of human nature to untangle the tensions and jealousies of a community to get at the truth.

This last reason combined with the ability that Burley demonstrated repeatedly to pin down an image in just a few words makes this an excellent read.

 

The point of the “Blast from the Past” category is to bring together my reviews of books that aren’t new but are still good – usually very good.

They may be out of print completely and only available second hand  or they may have been reissued via eBook format (whole series I feared lost to new readers have come back that way, noticeably the Bognor stories of Tim Heald recently).

Either way they are books that I think deserve to be brought back into the light and re-assessed for a modern audience.

Mark

 

[acx_slideshow name=”line of duty series 2″]

Continue reading “TV Review: Line of Duty – Series 2” →

Favourite Discovery of 2011

Absolutely the best thing that I have read this year is Carlo Lucarellis De Luca trilogy (Carte Blanche (Carta Bianca), The Damned Season (L’estate Torbida) and Via delle Oche ) – small delicately shaped morsels (the longest is 160 pages and all three together are shorter than your typical doorstop novel).

In the last days and aftermath of World War II Italy, the world of Commissario de Luca, a fundamentally good man driven by a desire for justice who is (and has been) forced by circumstance to work for people with evil in the hearts is, to my mind, one of the great creations of modern crime fiction. I have the award winning TV movie adaptions on my to-be-watched list for Christmas and can’t wait.

 

Best of 2011

Of the new releases in 2011 (either in paperback or hardback), I would recommend (not in any particular order)

• Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason (the 9^th book in the series but using Elinborg rather than Erlendur as the chief protagonist)
• Bad Boy by Peter Robinson (the 19^th Inspector Banks novel)
• Dead Man’s Grip by Peter James (7^th Detective Superintendent Roy Grace novel)
• Bryant & May and The Memory of Blood by Christopher Fowler (9^th book about Arthur Bryant, John May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit)
• The Inspector and Silence by Hakan Nesser (5^th Chief Inspector Van Veeteren book)
• Scream by Nigel McCrery (3^rd Chief Inspector Lapslie novel)
• Down these Green Streets edited by Declan Burke(an anthology of essays and short stories on Irish crime fiction)

They reflect my liking for police procedurals.

 

Of the new releases in 2012 (either in paperback or hardback), I would strongly recommend (in alphabetical order by author as I don’t want to choose an order)

• Fowler, Christopher – BRYANT & MAY AND THE INVISIBLE CODE (10^th novel about Arthur Bryant, John May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit – another strong Bryant & May novel with a very intricate plot with lots of twists and turns; some new characters (some of which are almost fantastical) are introduced to set up for the future which he has got a 2 book deal for starting with BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART).
• James, Peter – NOT DEAD YET (8^th Detective Superintendent Roy Grace novel)
• Nesbo, Jo – THE BAT (the 1^st Harry Hole novel chronologically – it was nice to see the back plot to the later novels explored in more depth)
• Rankin, Ian – STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE (Rebus is back – I read it in a day and loved it)
• Robinson, Peter – BEFORE THE POISON (not a DCI Banks book but it takes the well-used idea of somebody becoming obsessed with solving a decades-old murder and executes it very well)

 

Other 2012 releases that had good points were

• McKinty, Adrian – THE COLD COLD GROUND (the 1^st Sean Duffy novel set in 1980s Northern Ireland; yes I am biased as I go past most of the places in this novel on my train to work every day but this is an assured police procedural in the main – the next book (I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET) is just out as I write and if it is just a tad better then that is one of my 2013 best reads sorted)
• Staincliffe, Cath  – DEAD TO ME  (the 1st Scott and Bailey tie-in novel by Cath Staincliffe; yes this is a tv tie-on but it captures the characters and is compellingly written)
• Tursten, Helene – NIGHT ROUNDS (the 4th Irene Huss novel; this is a good novel but I have seen the first 6 Swedish TV movie adaptions so I spoilt it for myself).
• Wanner, Len – THE CRIME INTERVIEWS VOLUMES ONE AND TWO (These are available most easily for Kindles but if you like tartan noir, they are a good insight into how authors minds work as they have interviews with 19 crime writers between the two volumes)

 

‘Blasts from the past’ series reread or read for the first time in 2012 are

• Crispin, Edmund – the Gervase Fen series (I re-read these in the Summer. They are whodunit novels with complex plots written in a humorous, literary style with references to English literature, poetry, and music; my favourites are THE MOVING TOYSHOP (1946) and FREQUENT HEARSES (1950) – it is a crying shame that Crispin went 25 years between the penultimate and the last novel in the series).
• Burley, W J – the Wycliffe series (I remember the tv series with Jack Shepherd well and recently bought them on DVD but had never read the books; yes they are dated and even the later ones read like those written in the 1970s (they were 22 written from 1968 to 2000) but they are also tightly plotted concisely written books with a great sense of place and a complex main character)
• Edwards, Martin – the Lake District Mystery series (these were a new read for me and as said elsewhere on the website these are very classy page turners with a good sense of history and the area it is set in – the English Lake District)
• Harvey. John – the Charlie Resnick series (I am just over halfway through re-reading this quality police procedural series set in Nottingham in the late 1980s and 1990s in the main – the last one was published a decade later in 2008)

 

Again, they reflect in the main my liking for police procedurals.

Of the new releases in 2013, I would strongly recommend (in alphabetical order by author as I don’t want to choose an order)

• Brett, Simon – A DECENT INTERVAL (the 18th of the Charles Paris novels by Simon Brett and the first to be published for 16 years; somewhat darker than before but still a good read)
• McKinty, Adrian – I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET (the 2^nd Sean Duffy novel set in 1980s Northern Ireland; yes I am biased as I go past most of the places in this novel on my train to work every day and part of this one is set in my village but this is a very assured police procedural with just one more in the series (AND IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE) to be published in January 2014)
• Nesbø, Jo – POLICE & COCKROACHES (both tr. Don Bartlett) (the 10^th & 2^nd Harry Hole novels chronologically – POLICE carries on from PHANTOM and with COCKROACHES it was once again nice to see the back plot to the later novels explored in more depth)
• Rankin, Ian – SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE (Rebus is back on the force, older but not wiser – demoted back to his 1987 rank so he could return with Siobhan Clarke as his boss)
• Tursten, Helene – THE GOLDEN CALF (tr. Laura A. Wideburg) (the 5th Irene Huss novel in the series and to be translated into English; a fairly conventional police procedural with a likeable main character, well plotted with a good core idea and excellently realised characters who interact with one another realistically and are likeable).

 

Tursten, Helene – ‘The Golden Calf’ (translated by Laura A Wideburg)
Hardback: 340 pages (Feb. 2013) Publisher: Soho Press ISBN: 1616950080

This is the fifth of the Irene Huss novels to be translated into English and the second translated by Laura A Wideburg – there are 10 in total published in Swedish thus far.

Irene Huss is a detective-inspector with the Violent Crimes unit in Göteborg – an especially busy day for Huss and her long-time associate, Tommy Persson, starts with the murder of Kjell Ceder – nicknamed “The Golden Calf” for his ability to attract investors. His body was discovered by Sanna, his much younger wife upon her return home with her infant son. Prior to her marriage, Sanna had been newsworthy for her involvement in a spectacular dot-com enterprise failure; the unit learns that the victims in the double-homicide that it is also investigating were tied to the same enterprise and to Sanna. Three years before, Huss and Persson had unsuccessfully investigated the disappearance of another principal in the business and Huss does not believe in coincidence. The trail that Huss follows is a complicated one taking her from Göteborg to Paris and back.

THE GOLDEN CALF is my favourite of the five Irene Huss novels translated thus far. This is a fairly conventional police procedural with a likeable main character, who unusually for such books has few personal problems. It is well plotted with a good core idea and excellently realised characters who interact with one another realistically and are likeable. The only significant flaw for me is that the ending seems a bit rushed.

I will definitely buy the next Irene Huss novel and will look at for other translations by Laura A Wideburg as she was also responsible for translating the previous one in English (NIGHT ROUNDS) which I also enjoyed.

Mark Bailey, Northern Ireland
March 2013

 

Originally published at EuroCrime

Simms, Chris – ‘Scratch Deeper’
Hardback: 256 pages (Sep. 2012) Publisher: Creme de la Crime ISBN: 1780290357

This is the first in a projected series of novels featuring Detective Constable Iona Khan who is half Scottish and half Pakistani; she was born in Scotland but spent most of her life in Manchester.

She finds herself on her first day in the Greater Manchester Police Counter Terrorism Unit being left to her own devices to investigate a query raised by a group of tunnel explorers called the Sub-Urban Explorers who became concerned when someone of perceived Middle Eastern origin tries to join their number and get details of tunnels under Central Manchester at the time of a Labour Party Conference at the Manchester Centre. The rest of the Counter Terrorism Unit are focusing on the conference itself above ground and DC Khan is left to deal with the potential threat mostly by herself with support from police colleagues outside the Counter Terrorism Unit, the CCTV operators and the academic supervisor of the potential terrorist when he was a student. The situation becomes more complex when the cousin of the potential terrorist is linked to the murder of a British Law Lord in Mauritius – the cousin came to visit the UK and now the potential terrorist and his cousin have disappeared.

This novel does keep your attention as the plot moves along reasonably quickly with enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged – although even at around 260 pages, the novel could be trimmed a teensy bit.

There is a lot of useful character background in terms of developing the supporting cast, for example there is conflict between Iona’s sort-of-ex-boyfriend and her new boss going back to when they were both in the Army in Iraq. This with her family background means that we see Iona as existing in a realistic world leaving plenty of room for future novels to spin out from this backdrop.

Overall, SCRATCH DEEPER is a good police procedural with an interesting and engaging lead character, about whom I would be interested in reading more.

Mark Bailey, Northern Ireland
November 2012

Originally published at EuroCrime