Character is king in the latest crime fiction

Thriller writers are hard pressed to stand out in what’s become a very crowded field. As a result, from Cardiff to Kansas we meet every conceivable kind of detective: if one walks with a telltale limp, another has no legs at all. Even the requirements of diversity can’t disguise the desperation of the search for distinctive heroes, or how variety itself has become a convention.

Simon Mason’s A Killing in November (Quercus, £14.99) begins with more than a nod to thriller traditions. It’s set in the fictional Oxford college of St Barnabas, with a grumpy provost wooing a corrupt Middle Eastern potentate, a college servant with a hidden agenda and, naturally, an unknown woman found strangled in the provost’s office. This is Morse country, with an only slightly updated kind of car.

Yet even early on there are suggestions of the author’s highly original take on the genre. When the sheik abruptly leaves the college, fearful for his safety, he is pursued by a menacing posse in hoodies; we expect an assassination attempt at any minute. Instead, the killers turn out to be a quartet of undergraduates, who at the climactic moment moon rather than maim their target. Then an apparently criminal type, sleeping in his low-rent house on the city’s outskirts, is awakened by a phone call at 3 a.m. A deal, it seems, is going down. Grabbing his Glock 26, he drives, against all our expectations, to St Barnabas. There, to the night porter’s disbelief, the man is revealed to be the CID detective assigned to investigate the murder of the mystery woman.

The detective is called Ryan Wilkins and he has grown up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Oxford, relying on native intelligence rather than education to push his way into the police.