What with a 2 week holiday and covid it's been a great crime reading month. I also made one attempt to read something more challenging (The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watts) early in the month when I was still poorly, but really couldn't focus for itching and what you might call mild but chronic exhaustion.
So that must mean we're due some short Crime Fiction reviews:
The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman is the most recent of the books I've read, both in the sense of when it was written / set (still over 10 years old though) and when I actually read it. Set in the utterly bonkers art world of New York, but taking in quite a lot of other places and people, Kellerman's main protagonist is utterly convincing in his fond and not so fond descriptions of everything including his city and himself, and provides a fantastic sense of place and time.
Our story starts with the discovery of pages and pages of connecting drawings, all numbered to be fitted together in one vast work, abandoned in the empty flat of a building belonging to the Muller family. Since our narrator is the youngest son of that family, opting out of his dad's business and into his own gallery, naturally he gets called in. Equally naturally he sees dollar signs and markets the work, artist's absence notwithstanding.
Only then one of the cherubs in a central part of the work is reprinted in the press and turns out to be the spitting image of a real child from a cold case, and from there it all starts falling apart...
This one has been sitting on my shelves a while and I'm really glad I finally got round to it.
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson is another one from my shelves. I didn't realise when I started that it was True Crime, a genre I'm not very fond of as it often feels voyeuristic. In this case though the details were so fascinating - much of the story of Newton's work on gravity and optics is part of the history I've picked up without knowing how, a woven-in part of British culture, but his later work with the mint, and the issues of disappearing silver coinage, and the way justice worked (or didn't work) before proper police and lawyers, made for a fascinating and enlightening read.
Coffin, Scarcely Used, Bump in the Night and Hopjoy Was Here - by Colin Watson.
I picked up these three books - the first three in the Flaxborough series - secondhand while I was on holiday in Devon (Paignton is rich in charity shops and places to buy fudge, fish and chips, and buckets and spades). I had previously read the first in an older edition and had no idea the series had been republished recently until I stumbled across these. They are almost police procedurals, and our erstwhile inspector is bright, but not genius or maverick or inclined to dramatic denouements, and has a dry humour that I really enjoy. Each book is better than the last, so I may have to buy number four and see if that trend continues.
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton.
We begin, dear reader, with a man lost in a wood, unsure how he came there, unsure who he is. All he can remember is the name Anna, and that he's let her down somehow.
This is a doorstop of a book, but strangely unputdownable. Our hero - if he is a hero - is trapped in a country house murder mystery, and each time he sleeps or dies he comes back as a different character and lives the same day's events, culminating in the apparent suicide of Evelyn Hardcastle. The only way to escape is, of course, to solve the mystery.
Turton credits Agatha Christie as his influence and if you like Christie this is a very nice tribute without being too derivative. I will say though that the final explanation for what was going on really did test my suspension of belief. Perhaps though, that was because I didn't want an explanation.
Simisola - Ruth Rendell.
There are some challenging themes in this book. The most overt one, and the one I feel fares worst because it is so overt, is racism. Wexford spends a lot of time thinking about his reactions to the family of a missing girl because they are one of the very few black families in the Cotswold town (whose name I can't remember and can't be bothered to look up) and then, having spent so much time thinking and trying to avoid being racist (which, of course is 'othering' in itself), Rendell brilliantly and wincingly shows how actions can speak so much louder than all this introspection ever could, how some people can simply become invisible, and what horrible things can go completely under the radar in nice homes.
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