Next up: The Rage by Gene Kerrigan and Skin Deep by Peter Dickinson, the 2012 and 1969 winners, respectively. And boy, does the reader feel every year of that 63 year gap.
The Rage is quintessential; set in Dublin, Ireland, we follow Detective Sergeant Tidey of the Garda as he jumps between several investigations, one of which involves recently paroled Vincent Naylor, a criminal with fast-developing plans for his next score. I believe there is quote out there to the effect that the best Irish writers are obsessed with Ireland, down to their bones. I don’t know if I believe it or not, but this book would certainly be listed in the “supporting evidence” category. 2012 is just long enough after the Irish bubble burst that there are more post-mortems on the economy, housing market, and parties involved than there are on actual bodies. Apart from a fairly graphic opening scene, the victims of the crimes feel remote, distant. The cityscape of Dublin is described with more detail and ambiance than the people who inhabit it, as if even fully deflated the property bubble cannot help but push out other subject matter. Tidey himself is deftly done – it’s unclear if this is one of a series or a standalone book to me but feels like the latter – but the characters around him feel more like orbital bodies than human beings. Relationships are concretely defined in a relative sense, and we get just enough to make each person more than one-dimensional, but things feel textbooks rather than visceral. Nor do we have much beyond the usual cop tropes to latch on to – officers of rank are beholden to politicians and don’t care about the little people, budgets are everything, good cops work on their days off like a dog with a bone, and so on. We’ve seen all this before, and while Kerrigan makes it wonderfully consumable, with great flow and balance, it feels more like empty calories than I expected.
The more interesting character is that of Vincent Naylor, who we quickly come to root for as he sets up an armed car robbery with his brother and two others. A thug and a killer, we nonetheless admire his good sense and willingness to be governed by his long-term goals rather than the ebb and flow of emotion. Having put aside the petty crimes of his youth, Vincent is out to make a real score and get out from under the shadow of the gangland toughs he has previously worked for. Vincent and his brother, Noel, are perhaps the best-drawn characters in the story, and their arc is the most gripping of the book. By contrast Tidey, workmanlike but unenthusiastic, is hard to love even as he bears the torch for justice. As with Tidey, however, the farther charactesr get from Vincent’s immediate orbit, the more stock they become. The various gangsters we are introduced to are the typical tough-guy-in-a-nice-suit or the cunning-and-ruthless crime lord who won’t hesitate to eliminate any threat. They play their parts, but by the end we feel that Vincent and Tidey are just pinballs banging into predictable paddles and bumpers as they head towards the wrap-up.
The ending of The Rage is eminently foreseeable, and admirable in its neatness if not its originality. Having plunged us into an ethical morass over the last half of the book, the resolution does nothing to shock us back to a black-and-white view of the world, nor is it convincing enough to leave a lasting impression of its ambiguity. Perhaps, when it was first published, its mixture of financial slump, crime, politics, and religion perfectly encapsulated a moment in time. Indeed, the most poignant character in the book is a man who lost his daughter to drugs and then his son to gang violence before he gave up and dove into the bottle. His articulation of his position is well put, and begs many questions about how to respond to events out of our control. But on a larger scale, The Rage feels more like an attempt as semiotics in the form of a detective story. It doesn’t work for me, not least because the central crime that opens the book is solved in a thoroughly uninspiring way. An Irishman would perhaps understand this book better, but for an American, this is a well-executed but not particularly noteworthy novel.
As for Skin Deep…the cover of this novel is decidedly creepy (not necessarily a bad thing in a crime novel!) but the summary on the back takes the cake, alluding to murder committed with an owl, and a ‘homosexual’ (the quotes are present in the blurb) relationship. The first few pages reveal this bizarre description to be mostly sensationalist, but also that the reader is in for big trouble. Words like “wog” and “negroid” make appearances almost immediately, and even beside the racism, this book felt like it was published well before 1969. The author appears to have started with something high concept – the last remnants of a New Guinea tribe (most having been killed by the Japanese in World War 2) live in a house in London with adopted the daughter of missionary who taught them, who also happens to have been adopted into the tribe. It reads almost like The Sign of Four, where the mystery itself is interspersed with flashbacks to the tribe in New Guinea. The device might be effective if the depictions weren’t so offensively jarring at times. As it is, watching Detective Superintendent Pibble (what a name!) do his best to solve the murder of one of the tribesman is unsatisfying. The amount of exposition overwhelms the crime, as the author revels in how these transported people live, their general appearance, and how strange they are. Pibble, good Englishman that he is, takes lunch in a pub to eat sausage, cheese, and warm bitter, and reflects for the umpteenth time that he’d like to be done with this one. At one point he makes pointed use of 1960s slang, which was hilarious but honestly the easiest part of the book to understand. Beyond that, Pibble is given to exclamations of “Crippen!” and references to things that simply do not translate into 2021. I got halfway through, and had to skip to the last 10 pages to see how it turned out. To give Dickinson credit, by the time I had reached the halfway point I knew the whole cast of characters and the general setup, and when I learned who the murderer was and how they did it (although I lost motive somewhere in the parts I skipped) I was impressed – I would never have guessed it, although the answer was in plain sight. So Dickinson clearly has the core detective chops, it simply appears that in 1969 his willingness to delve into the foreignness of these refugees made for something unusual enough to win the Gold Dagger. I sincerely hope that this was his only outing with Pibble but I could, perhaps, be convinced to try another Dickinson novel when the pain from Skin Deep recedes enough to be just that.
All in all, two weaker entries, but more evidence that even when we confine ourselves to traditional detective-responds-to-latest-crime novels there is a vast spectrum of stories to tell. From the River Liffey to the jungles of Guinea, interesting characters, uneven plots, and (alas) poorly-aging language abounds.
Updated Ranking:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
- The Rage
- Skin Deep (not recommended)
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