The Oxford Despoiler, by Gary Dexter
Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman
Windows on the Moon, by Alan Brownjohn
The Oxford Despoiler is a collection of eight stories introducing Henry St Liver, a Victorian detective, and his biographer and assistant, Olive Salter. Henry is tall and lean, with a lofty bearing but the habits of the most dishevelled bohemian. Olive drifted to London and met Henry, and in very little time became his invaluable foil.
If it sounds familiar, it should, since this is in part a warm and cleverly observed pastiche of the Victorian detective genre and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. Nods to Conan Doyle include the regulation half-witted policemen, the fact that many of the cases contain no real crime, and the trademark references to other investigations too shocking to be set before the public (such as ‘the affair of the Moist-Handed Madonna’ and ‘the strange case of the Fifteenth Ewe’). There are also some smaller hooks for the dedicated Sherlockian (for instance, Olive’s publisher, Drebber and Drebber, name-checks the first victim in the Holmes canon: Enoch J. Drebber, from A Study in Scarlet). Perhaps funniest of all is the way that Olive innocently draws regular attention to a wonderful absurdity in Doyle’s stories, namely that Holmes spends his time swearing secrecy in confidential cases and compounding justifiable felonies — only for the good Watson to inform the world about them.
The Oxford Despoiler takes on more than just Holmes, however; Gary Dexter’s wider target is repressed Victorian society itself — although here, as with the mimicking of Doyle, the satire is fuelled by affection rather than by disdain. Unlike Holmes, Henry is pretty unobservant; he relies instead on his position as England’s foremost ‘sexologist’, which gives him unequalled knowledge of matters concupiscent. By proving that every mystery has, at its root, some outlandish perversion, Henry wittily shows off a culture in which sex was unmentionable and yet omnipresent.
A crime story of a more serious kind is Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman, which is set in Cambridge. The novel begins at the fictitious Ariel College, where a third female student in two years has been gruesomely murdered. Sitting next to the butchered corpse, bruised and insensible with shock, is Olivia Corscadden, another student. Matthew Denisoan, the psychologist attached to the case, is convinced that Olivia saw what happened, but for weeks she is in a state of terror-induced catatonia to the point where she has to be tube-fed. When her condition improves, Denison interviews her and a shocking picture begins slowly to emerge, as Denison and his colleagues in the police try to capture a serial killer.
In structure, this is classic crime fiction, with a ring of suspects, false leads and deftly laid twists — the very stuff of Morse and Marple. In content, however, it is less homely. By comparison with Twisted Wing, an episode of Taggart seems positively dainty: this novel explores deep psychosis and child abuse, among other horrors, and presents murders of extraordinary bloodthirstiness, so that one is alternately impressed by the technique and chilled by the effect.
There are just a few teething problems in this strong debut. It could have done with better proofing, to excise errors such as ‘she was sat’ and to rework the odd infelicity of style. The ending also, while gripping, left some small areas of the plotting looking questionable. But Newman is a good new writer, and Twisted Wing is a well-paced, rigorously researched and captivating crime novel which would lend itself to a screen adaptation.
Alan Brownjohn’s Win- dows on the Moon is set in what is currently the most fashionable period of modern British history, the years just after the second world war, when a nation’s euphoria subsided as the financial cost of victory sunk in. At the centre of the book are Perce and Maureen Hollard and their son, Jack. Each member of this suburban middle-class family is searching for some form of improvement in life. Perce works in a middle-ranking office job, and has to put up with the fixed hierarchy above him and a younger rival desperate to use him as a stepping-stone. Maureen works in a café to make up the money, and slips into an affair with her boss, not so much from dislike of Perce as from an awakening sense that life should be more exciting than it currently is. Jack, their bookish son, will be the first member of the family to go to university; he loves his parents but recoils from what he perceives to be their life of unendurable mediocrity.
Elsewhere, a French collaborator tries to start again in England, and Jack’s girlfriend, Sylvia, makes a difficult passage into womanhood under the too-heavy influence of her older sister, who drives her away from the lovelorn Jack. Brownjohn builds his characters’ stories patiently, portraying with skill the sad gulf between their modest dreams and the realities of their lives. While one might wish for prose that calls more overtly upon the author’s skills as a poet, Windows on the Moon is still a plaintive and measured success.
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