fiction – Pandora's Looking-Glass

Breaking bread with monsters: a dark Immorality Play from Lisa Cutts

The world is, alas, not straightforward – choices are hard, mistakes are made, doubts are cast and events in the past shape and often warp the future; all elements captured in Mercy Killing, by crime writer and real-life detective, Lisa Cutts. Centred around the murder of a known paedophile, Cutts deliberately muddies the waters throughout the novel, crafting a story that makes the reader’s reactions to characters less than straightforward, playing on our unease.

What Cutts is exploring in the novel, a gritty, urban police procedural informed by her own experiences as an investigating detective, is the idea that bad things can come from good intentions, a concept which affects all the characters involved in the drama, and which sees each of them grappling with their own conflicts and making uncomfortable liaisons. At the head of the case, DI Powell is fully aware that, to solve the case, he must ‘break bread with a monster,’ and knows precisely the moment when he crosses the line. His personal dance with the devil involves a meeting with the less than wholesome Martha, who leads the Volunteer Army, a group of local people which at first seems to have a positive mandate – those involved are ‘trying to make it as safe for people as they can about living with sex offenders around them and we want to work with the police. We’re trying to do our bit to help.’ Yet urban vigilantes taking the law into their own hands is never a good idea, and later in the book the reason for the creation of the group is revealed, arising as it does from yet another evil beginning.

DC Sophia Ireland’s own stance on pursuing criminals neatly outlines the whole moral dilemma of the book: ‘we can’t live in a society that thinks it’s ok to kill them off without so much as a trial.’ She has a firm grasp of the the crux of the book right there – the battle between justice and righteousness. But she in turn has an internal conflict: she is not convinced that DC Gabrielle Royston is suited to investigating the case, but does not want to betray a colleague – and Royston’s own situation is not clear-cut, either…

For all the grim issues the novel confronts, they are balanced by touches of humour throughout the story. One of the threads running through the plot is Powell’s slowly unravelling marriage – a situation arising, it becomes clear, again out of the best of intentions; in one scene, he returns late from work yet again, and undresses next to his wife in the hope that there might be an amorous encounter. ‘ ‘Don’t roll your bloody socks into a ball.’ Her words were accompanied by the sound of her turning over, and the click of the light switch…Sex was certainly off.’

From the outset, Cutts creates a series of characters, none of whom has a clear-cut status that is morally right or wrong. The reader is left unsure where to place their sympathies, and is thereby drawn into the depths of a web of moral ambiguity. Each suspect – and some of the police, too – has a stain on their character, which only becomes clear as the novel unfolds, but each has some element of their background, some aspect to their story, that means a straight and outright condemnation by the reader is not possible. It’s an effective device that pulls the reader onwards, leading them through what might be called an ‘immorality play,’ a darkly intricate tale where, as one of the characters observes early in the novel, even though the case may be solved and justice brought, there can be no winners.

Mercy Killing is the first in Cutts’ East Rise Incident Room series, published by Simon and Schuster in 2016

Crabbed Age and Youth: a slow maturing of style in Murder on the Pilgrims Way

The fourth book in the developing Whitstable Pearl series of crime novels by Julie Wassmer, Murder on the Pilgrims Way, is a meditation on age, as perhaps is fitting for an evolving canon that, in this its fourth instalment, reaches a new level of maturity and literary accomplishment.

Taking her heroine out of both her seaside town of Whitstable and her usual haunt of Canterbury, Wassmer instead opts to place her in an idyllic rural retreat near Chartham, setting the scene for that classic of the crime genre, the Country House Murder. It is a bold move, placing the book directly in the lineage of a British literay tradition reaching from Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and J Jefferson Farjeon to later luminaries such as PD James and Reginald Hill. This affords plenty of opportunities for vivid description of rural scenes and lakeside trysts which perfectly capture the lazy haze of an English countryside lulled by summer’s warmth, as well as giving Wassmer the opportunity to explore a more focused arena.

The preoccupation with age and the impact of growing older is an element which operates beneath the novel’s surface, but underpins the narrative, in particular the gradual evolution of the character of its heroine, private detective-cum-restaurant owner, Pearl Nolan. This time, we see her struggling to come to terms with her own growing redundancy both to her restaurant, which is increasingly able to manage without her, and to her son, Charlie, who is living an independent life studying at university, but who returns occasionally to work at the restaurant, thereby bringing together and magnifying those two elements which are the focus of Pearl’s life, but which are able to function without her involvement. Pearl is acutely aware of this herself, at one point reflecting that ‘having turned forty she felt as if she was entering a new era, the second act of a play in which she was the main character, but unsure of her role.’ Elsewhere, other characters reflect that ‘that’s the nature of growing older, isn’t it ? Somehow our roles are always reversed.’ The central playboy character, Nico Caruso, is a celebrity chef who trades on his youthful good looks, contrasting with Marshall, the godfather to the lady who owns the country house at which the story unfolds, who is elderly and walks with a cane. The mill at Chartham, visible from the gardens of the estate, is ‘old enough to be mentioned in the Domesday Book;’ later in the novel, Old Harry, ‘the oldest bell in the Cathedral,’ is heard to ring. Excavations at a local field connected with medieval shipping unearth ‘an ancient boat…but apparently it disintegrated on contact with the air.’ The fragility of age, and of history, lies like the buried boat not far below the prose’s summer-hued surface as the world ‘old’ tolls like the cathedral bell throughout the novel.

The character who could provide meaningful focus for an increasingly isolated Pearl, but with whom she cannot quite make things happen, is DCI McGuire, with whom she has been fencing romantically since the first novel. McGuire is still wrestling with his status as an outsider, as a Down From Londoner, since his relocation to Canterbury, although for him this is ‘something behind which he could hide.’ The constant conflict between the local and the outsider is a recurrent theme throughout the books, and a useful means of generating tension both on the larger, social, scale, as well as between Pearl and McGuire themselves. McGuire, too, cannot escape the issue of aging, as he nostalgically reflects on ‘the lyrics to an old pop song’ and his floundering relationship with Pearl.

The classic plot device of assembling all the suspects together in one place for the final denouement, arising in a pleasingly organic manner from the nature of the novel’s central theme of a week-long cookery course, builds the tension nicely towards the end and allows Pearl a dramatic moment to examine the motives, means and opportunity of all the suspects before solving the case, in a fashion reminiscent of Poirot wrapping things up on the Nile or the Orient Express.

Overall, this is a deeply satisfying novel that boldly positions itself in a classic crime fiction sub-genre, and which works all the better for it, giving it a unified concept and identity away from the hymnody in praise of Whitstable and its environs, a strong feature of the preceding books. Wassmer can’t quite resist celebrating her home-town, though (and why not); ‘one of the town’s greatest successes was its ability to adapt without sacrificing its inherently quirky nature,’ an observation which can also apply to Wassmer’s series of novels itself and which highlights what is proving to be one of its greatest strengths.

Murder on the Pilgrims Way is published by Constable / Little Brown Books.

Fascinatin’ Rhythm: dancing with Joanne Harris’ ‘The Lollipop Shoes’

Some books call to you from a shelf; that silent yet persuasive voice that gets inside your head and tells you that you want, nay, need, to read them. Right now.

lollipop_shoes This happens to me quite often – as a compulsive book-buyer, this voice doesn’t need to shout any more, it just nudges me in the right direction and knows that I’ll comply, rolling its eyes (mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean) at the inevitability of it all – but not quite so compulsively as with Joanne Harris’ The Lollipop Shoes. I’m late to the Joanne Harris party; the book came out in 2007, and follows Chocolat, written in 2001 (which I hadn’t read either), so I have some catching up to do. The siren-call of The Lollipop Shoes isn’t hard to fathom – a heady blend of the front cover’s design, the heft of the book in the hand, the feel of the pages – and I succumbed instantly.

What beguiled me about the book from fairly early on was the rise and fall of the rhythm of the prose, the cadences, the dance between duple and triple metre – as a musician, it’s hard not to notice this aspect of any sound that reaches the ear – but this was the first time it had been so striking. It wasn’t just telling a story; the words were more akin to a kind of invocation, entirely appropriate for a story concerning the power of spells, of magic.

‘Death grins out from the woodcut design; jealous, joyless, hollow-eyed, hungry – Death the insatiable; Death the implacable; Death the debt we owe to the gods.’

It’s not just the sound of the words operating here – assonance, alliteration – it’s the way they are struck, too; the triplet-metre feel that moves to a duple-metre feel at the same time as the alliterative passage ‘jealous, joyless.’ The metric change imparts, quite deliberately, a more leaden tread to the manner in which the passages steps, in contrast to the 6/8 metre that surrounds it.

‘So many lives just there for the taking; there for the tasting, for someone like me.’

Again, it’s that mixture of sound and rhythm, the subtle shift from ‘taking’ to ‘tasting’ and the rhythm of the sentence that has me hearing it sung in haunting tones by someone like folk-singer, Mary Hampton. Whole passages seem to pass by in a stately dance; it’s impossible not to be hypnotised. Joanne’s prose does this a lot – in fact, it was difficult to read the whole of chapter Four without hearing the prose’s inner music and rhythm pulling the ear.

And that, perhaps, is what the book is all about; not just telling the reader about the power of magic, but actually working its own enchantment, too. With this novel, it’s not only about where the story takes you – it’s about the how, the way in which it does so, too. The excitement about contemporary music is very similar; not just ending up in a new landscape, but being taken there in an unexpected fashion, with new encounters along the way. Joanne’s book has this same appeal; sometimes dancing with the Puckish feel of a Tippett string quartet, elsewhen stepping with the poise of a stately gavotte.

Its bewitchment was such that I went out in a daze and binge-bought five more, helpless in the grip of a need to read further. I can never enter a bookshop without weeping in sheer frustration ‘But there’s so much to READ!’ No matter how much I read, more books are coming out all the time, and I’ll never be able to keep up. But that’s part of the attraction, the unattainable goal that you know you can never reach but one towards which you’re always being driven. My daughter needs a book for a Year 8 project this term: needless to say, I pressed this into her hand crying ‘This one! THIS ONE! You’ll love it; there’s love, magic, chocolate, and an inner music…’ I hope she does.

I’m late to the Joanne Harris party, it’s true; but I’m excited to be here…