Tudor thrillers are thick on the ground nowadays but this one is rather special. The Bones of Avalon (Corvus, £16.99) is something of a departure for Phil Rickman, best known for his excellent Merrily Watkins series about a diocesan exorcist in contemporary Herefordshire. Here he writes in the first person as Dr John Dee, the astrologer, mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1560, William Cecil despatches him to Glastonbury, with his younger but more sophisticated friend Robert Dudley, to search for the bones of King Arthur. But Dee’s mission turns into far more than an attempt to strengthen the dynastic foundations of the Tudor dynasty: there’s a conspiracy against the Queen for him to contend with, and also something even darker lurking in the shadows.
Rickman makes a wonderfully assured leap into the 16th century. In this compelling and historically convincing novel, he recreates a world of religious and political uncertainty where one man’s science is another man’s witchcraft, and where the mundane and the mystical rub shoulders. Dee, whose inner uncertainties are mirrored by the fragmented sentences of his narrative, is intellectually brilliant, socially gauche and entirely believable. All in all, this is an assured and compelling opening to a new historical series.
The results are often entertaining when literary novelists rearrange the furniture of crime fiction within the enclosed confines of the genre. The Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker is an author who has a wonderful ability to create dysfunctional eccentrics. Burley Cross Postbox Theft (Fourth Estate, £18.99) contains a multitude of them as the principal characters of an epistolary novel. Burley Cross is an affluent Yorkshire village populated by people with a taste for old-fashioned letter-writing. As the title suggests, the story revolves around the theft of the village postbox. Thirty-one of the letters, many of them typographically varied and quite amazingly long, form the bulk of the narrative, together with equally idiosyncratic communications from the investigating police officers.
Barker uses the novel as a means of skewering the quirks of middle-class Middle England. Her language is wonderfully inventive, and many of the jokes are very good indeed. The fictional framework is not so much whimsical as fabulously surreal. This is all very much to the good. The problem is that like so many comic conceits, this one wears thin over the full-length novel, partly because of the lack of a strong narrative thread to tie it all together. For all its virtues, reading this book is like being shut in a room with a group of egotists taking it in turns to shout very loudly at you.
Russia’s past has become a popular destination for crime writers. William Ryan’s debut novel, The Holy Thief (Mantle, £12.99), is set in 1936, on the threshold of the Terror. The central character is Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev, a former soldier who now works for the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia. A beautiful young woman is messily tortured to death on an altar in an unconsecrated church. The discovery that the victim was a foreigner brings a political angle to the case. Korolev is soon aware of the baleful attention of the NKVD, whose motives are often difficult to discern and whose officers have terrifying powers over Soviet citizens — including lowly CID officers. Korolev’s investigation is dogged by violence and the creeping sense that the Chekhists have a sinister agenda of their own. Gradually, as the body count increases, it becomes clear that the fate of a national treasure is at stake.
As Philip Kerr and Tom Robb Smith have shown, totalitarian states offer interesting challenges to crime novelists. Ryan makes good use of them here. The background detail is dense and plausible. The thriller is solidly paced, though the ending has few surprises. Korolev, who at first seems a standard-issue tough guy with a heart, emerges as a more complicated character whose political certainties are sometimes undermined by atavistic religious pieties. The novel is billed as the first of a series, and it will be interesting to see where Korolev goes from here.
Films like Get Carter and Pulp cemented Mike Hodges’s reputation as a filmmaker. Now, in his seventies, he has written his first novel, Watching the Wheels Come Off (Max Crime, £7.99), which is also one of the launch titles of a new crime fiction imprint. Dr Herman Temple, a messianic guru, is about to conduct a seminar on leadership in the Grand Atlantic Hotel in a fading seaside resort not unlike Blackpool. Mark Miles, a priapic PR man is also in town, as one of his clients plans a coup as an escapologist. Also on the scene are two femme fatales, a private eye who packs his thermal underwear with his Smith & Wesson, and a supporting cast of oddball characters. The narrative delivers deadpan wisecracks with metronomic regularity. The result is undeniably good fun, though occasionally thin in texture as if lacking a dimension — almost as if it’s not so much a novel as an extended film treatment.
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