Mean Streets

Silly stuff – and a criminal waste of talent.

Sourpuss that I am, I loathe arch even more than cute. Catriona McPherson has loads going for her. She’s steeped herself in period lingo, and Dandy Gilver is pitch perfect. Clothes, furniture, technology, all spot on. What’s wrong is the plot and the gallumphing comedy. I think this is meant to be an hilarious pastiche of the pre-WW2 Sayers/Christie/Allingham format and it might have slipped down a treat if she hadn’t over-egged an already rich pudding with such daft goings-on. The classic plot is positively Aristotelian in the way it keeps to its own rules: the limited space and its socially cohesive group; an initial murder followed by a second when the perp begins to feel cornered; a plausible but false solution that brings the truth to light. Seemples.
Here, the intrepid heroine’s quarry is Fleur, the youngest of three sisters who has forsaken her picture-perfect family home to become a teacher in a remote Scottish boarding school. So far so okay. Dandy finds her inexplicably changed ‘as though the girl had been rendered by Rubens or Botticelli, but the woman was a work by Augustus John, a pale lozenge of a face…and a figure which hardly made so bold as to show against the draping of her clothes.’ You expect real psychological insight from writing like that, but you’ll be disappointed. The rest of the staff are a hopeless jumble of various kinds of battiness and the colourful locals have too many subplots of their own. It’s all just far too busy, which is a pity because it actually prevents us from seeing what a spiffing character Dandy Gilver might be if she had a little clear space around her.
There’s some gorgeous writing here. The invocation of a lost golden summer (shades of L.P.Hartley) is exquisite, but it belongs in a better book. A perceptive review in the Scotsman refers to the ‘underlying sadness of the inter-war period…that lifts Mcpherson’s books out of the cosy-crime genre’ but this lovely, plaintive strain is smothered by too much clever-clever. She reminds me of the brightest girl in the class who feels she has to play the clown to get a boy friend. This is an author who on a good day might have written I Capture the Castle. Instead, she finds herself obliged to squander her gifts on amiable tosh. Well, good luck to her I suppose – but I would love to think that she is secretly working away at something more worthy of her talents.

Big Bad Pharma and the Krek Waiters Peak Bristle

This is seriously scary stuff – but here’s a thing: author abandons sleuth’s defining flaw. I read the first of M.R.Hall’s series about the Bristle-based coroner Jenny Cooper with what’s known as ‘growing disbelief’. It was very well-written, had a good plot, gory forensics and just the right amount of local knowledge. But what I couldn’t take was the pills that Cooper was popping. She suffers from anxiety attacks: a nasty, debilitating affliction that’s particularly inconvenient for anyone who has to stand up and speak in public. I know a bit about it. But Jenny’s self-medication would stop a charging rhino in its tracks. She seemed far too dependent on mother’s little helpers to be doing her job properly and my suspension of disbelief became more and more unwilling.

Now she’s over it – hooray! I don’t know whether the intervening novels have carefully monitored her improvement, but I rather suspect that M.R.Hall got very tired of a device that wasn’t earning its keep. There’s an interesting lesson here. If you feel you need to Add Interest to a character by hobbling them with some malaise, make sure it’s one that has legs. This one was bound to get boring because of its very limited scope for engagement with the plot.

I’m still not finding Jenny Cooper as interesting as she should be, given her profession and her place of work. (As a Bristolian, I’ve always suspected that the city is far more depraved and corrupt than it likes to appear.) She’s not very good at relationships (oh dear!) and maybe her author isn’t that interested in them either. Jenny’s loyal assistant (who already has cancer) is desperately injured saving her boss from a mangling – but then gets forgotten, save for a rather flimsy postscript. Her teenage son is struck down by a deadly disease, but once he’s off the danger-list she hardly gives him a moment’s thought. Perhaps she will become increasingly solipsistic as the series continues, which could be interesting. But something very odd happens to the structure of this novel as it reaches its end. We reach page 358/389 with a heck of a lot of plot still to be untangled. But what follows isn’t the classic disclosure in the library: it’s a summary of tons of stuff that we haven’t been party to before. Very odd – as if our author hadn’t noticed that his pace was too slow for his page-limit.

I finished The Chosen Dead feeling a bit cheated, but I’d been thoroughly terrified en route. We may like to think that drug companies are trying to make us better, but the development of ethnically specific vaccines opens up the possibility of ethnically targetted biological weapons. This is close to the territory that John le Carré first explored in The Constant Gardener (2005) – powerful interests exploiting powerless people – but here it comes disturbingly close to home: the action starts with a mysterious fall from a bridge on the M5. I have no idea whether the science is reliable, but Hall makes it very plausible – more plausible to my mind that some of the more mundane aspects of his story. The autopsy suite may by now be too familiar to thrill, but the bugs that Jenny Cooper is pursuing in this flawed but compelling thriller are truly menacing.

Lemony Snicket meets Midsomer Murders

This takes the biscuit. We know that a new sleuth has to be based in a previously unused location and/or historical period, be subject to some interesting flaw in their personality /metabolism/physique and cope with a challenging relationship dynamics. So, pushing the envelope at all its corners here comes Flavia de Luce, misunderstood eleven year old orphan, whose favourite bedside reading is Alfred Swaine Taylor’s Poisons in Relation to Medical Jurisprudence (of 1848). The time is 1951. Flavia’s father is a former POW; her mother a missing mountaineer. And Bishop’s Lacey – her archetypal English village – has a body count that would be statistically abnormal in any other location.

Alan Bradley’s publishers are marketing this series as ‘the freshest and most engaging sleuth…since Precious Ramotswe.’ Well, I’ve had enough of Precious. Sweet tastes cloy after a while. Orion’s publicist should also be aware that an endorsement from the Mail on Sunday (‘The Flavia de Luce novels are a cult favourite’) is likely to put off a significant tranche of potential readers. This is the fifth in the series, and though I found it moderately entertaining, I’m not pining for those that have passed me by.

The readers who would lap it up are bright kids, and I’m passing my copy on to a precocious pre-teen female with a warning to her parents: beware of strange alterations in the taste of your food. It’s not quite Hogwarts but it should help with the withdrawal symptoms.