Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Among them is Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction. Loy has many of the classic characteristics of the breed, including the tastes for hard liquor, lovely women and lost causes. But Hughes places his protagonist in a sharply observed contemporary Dublin; and his plots erupt from the city’s faultlines.
In All The Dead Voices (John Murray, £16.99), the fourth novel in the series, a woman hires Loy to investigate a cold case — the murder of her father, a tax inspector with a dangerous habit of asking questions about the ill-gotten gains of powerful and superficially respectable people. Organised crime and dissident Republicanism inhabit a shady underworld of drugs, clubs and guns. This is a novel about how the present struggles to come to terms with the past: ‘There’s a reckoning you can make with history, a reasonable settlement,’ Loy believes. ‘And then there’s a kind of morbid fascination that borders on obsession ….’ On one level this is Dublin Noir at its best. On a deeper level, the real subject of Ed Loy’s investigation is modern Ireland itself.
Midnight Fugue (Harper Collins, £17.99), the latest instalment of Reginald Hill’s admirable Dalziel-and-Pascoe series, unfolds over 24 tightly-orchestrated hours. Superintendent Dalziel, still groggy from an encounter with Semtex at the end of his previous case, is keen to prove he’s back on form. As a private favour to a colleague, he blunders into the search for a police officer who went missing seven years earlier. He is unaware that a financier with a hidden past as a particularly predatory loan shark has sent a miniature hit squad on the same mission. The financier’s son, a rising star among Cameron’s Conservative MPs, has a PA with an agenda of her own. A tabloid journalist with a grudge spots an opportunity to nail both father and son. The competing strands of the narrative collide at Sunday lunch in a posh hotel, and soon someone has his face blown off with a shotgun blast. It’s business as usual in Mid-Yorkshire. Hill’s plot is elegantly constructed, and his prose is delectable; both have echoes of Wodehouse. Witty, slightly surreal and fundamentally humane, the novel is a welcome addition to one of the best crime series around.
Nicci French’s What To Do When Someone Dies (Michael Joseph, £12.99) starts with a chillingly simple premise: Ellie Falkner’s husband dies in a car crash. But there’s another corpse beside him — an attractive woman whom Ellie doesn’t know — and the crash itself is not easy to explain. She grapples with two monstrous possibilities, that her husband was having an affair, and that he was murdered. Friends and family believe her increasingly obsessive behaviour is irrational, a symptom of her grief. Ellie traces the dead woman, Milena, and meets her dysfunctional family. Ellie even assumes a false identity and takes over Milena’s job. Meanwhile her emotions take paranoid shapes, and her own motives arouse suspicion.
The power of this thriller, as so often with Nicci French’s novels, derives from the very ordinariness of its intimate and domestic setting. The plot develops from what is essentially a commonplace catastrophe affecting a pleasant married couple. It is easy for the reader to empathise with the grief of Ellie, the narrator — and, by the same emotional logic, it is equally easy to empathise with her desperate compulsion to find out the truth behind the death. It is a tribute to the quality of the writing that, though the plot strains belief in places, the narrative never loses its dreadful plausiblity.
There is some debate about whether the term Scandinavia properly includes Iceland. In terms of crime fiction it certainly does. My Soul To Take (translated by Bernard Scudder and Anna Yates, Hodder & Stoughton, £11.99) is the second of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s novels to be published in the UK. Its protagonist, the lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, also appeared in the first novel, Last Rituals. One of her clients summons her to look into alleged sightings of a ghostly child at his newly renovated farmhouse, now developed as a New Age resort. Soon afterwards a young woman is found brutally murdered in the grounds, and the client is the prime suspect. Lurking in the background are dark stories of family traumas and wartime Fascists.
In terms of its ingredients, the novel is both spooky and gruesome. But Thora’s distinctly chaotic private life provides both a welcome contrast and moments of very black humour (though perhaps not every reader will enjoy such touches as the SUV with its back seat awash with amniotic fluid). It’s rare to find a crime novel that’s both chilling and witty — an agreeable combination.
Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is Bleeding Heart Square (Penguin).
Comments