Mean streets | 27 November 2010

Christmas is coming, which generally leads to a surge in sales of crime fiction. Fortunately for readers, some delectable crime novels have appeared in the past few months. Among them is Val McDermid’s Trick of the Dark (Little, Brown, £18.99). This is not one of her series novels but a standalone thriller whose plot revolves around St Scholastika’s College, Oxford, a women’s college with a certain resemblance to St Hilda’s.

One of its alumnae is Charlie Flint, a clinical psychologist whose professional reputation is hanging in the balance. She receives an anonymous bundle of press cuttings relating to a recent murder at the college, now the subject of a high-profile criminal trial. Lured into investigating, Charlie finds that the tendrils from this case stretch back not only to another college-linked murder but also sideways, into her own emotionally fragile private life. The fact that many of the main characters are lesbian is significant in terms of the plot but otherwise irrelevant — a tribute to the quality of the characterisation in this fine novel. McDermid brilliantly portrays the escalating costs of obsessive love.

The notion of Oxbridge crime fiction immediately brings to mind Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1935 novel, Gaudy Night, which as it happens also deals with the cost of obsessive love, albeit in a rather different way. Jill Paton Walsh has taken on Sayers’s mantle and written three skilful sequels to the Lord Peter Wimsey series, drawing where possible on Sayers’s own material. The latest is The Attenbury Emeralds (Hodder, £18.99), which takes the story of Lord Peter and his wife, Harriet Vane the crime novelist, into the brave new world of the 1950s. It also harks back to Lord Peter’s first case, the details of which have hitherto been unknown.