A choice of first novels | 30 July 2011

As L.P. Hartley noted, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And no more so than during the two world wars, a fact that has provided a rich seam for several debut novelists to mine this summer.

In Mark Douglas-Home’s puzzler The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99), the tidal pull of a long-gone drama creates a psychological undertow for its hero Cal McGill. As the novel opens, Cal is on the run after covertly planting arctic flowers in Scottish ministers’ gardens as a subtle protest against the administration’s environmental policy. Cal is an oceanographer, skilled in the mapping of briny mysteries, logging sinister flotsam and jetsam through analysis of currents and shipping routes. His obsession with the secrets held by the nation’s watery depths derives from the fate of his grandfather, Uilleam, during the second world war. Uilleam was accidentally swept overboard from a minesweeping trawler. At least that’s the official line. Cal’s maritime charts tell another story.

Cal’s amusing political altercation is shelved by the police in return for his help investigating the murder of a teenage Ind-ian girl whose body has washed up on the Scottish shores. Douglas-Home expertly balances the introduction of a new kind of eco-sleuth, the awful realities of the sex-slave trade and an intriguing case of yesterday’s crimes rising to the surface like doom-laden driftwood.

The ripple effect of wartime failures also lies at the heart of Jamie Ford’s The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Allison & Busby, £12.99). The experience of Japanese-American citizens caught stateside in the wake of Pearl Harbor has become a dusty footnote to the conflict. However, Ford deftly pulls off a Hollywood-worthy romance from the files, one anchored to a true event. The titular hostelry is Seattle’s Panama Hotel, the gateway to the city’s Japantown.