For your consideration, 1994’s The Scold’s Bridle by Minette Walters, and 2005’s The Silence of the Grave by Ardnaldur Indrioason.
I can’t decide if I liked The Scold’s Bridle more, or hated it more, than its ranking below reflects. On the one hand, it is unusually character-focused for the genre. Half a dozen well-developed characters people the pages, with twice that many in supporting roles, and I am hard-pressed to think of another book that has such a quantity of paragraph-long soliloquies and speeches. Every character in this book seems to be extremely psychologically perceptive but also exquisitely patient in doling out their perceptions as well as (incidentally) the critical facts regarding the crime. The setup is simple but quite effective: a bitter old woman is found dead in her tub, wearing a scold’s bridle – a medieval device strapped to the head that forced a sharp piece of metal into the mouth to keep the wearer (usually a nagging woman, or scold) from talking. The bridle was a family heirloom, but the manner in which it is worn and the body is found casts some doubt on whether the crone’s death was suicide or murder. And off we go, with the victim’s GP as our central protagonist around whom all other characters begin to orbit as they are introduced.
The conceit is strong, but the execution can be maddening. The novel is incredibly psychological without, to me, becoming a psychological thriller in any way. And that’s perfectly fine – I applaud the attempt to break free from genre conventions – but the endless analysis of each character by the others becomes tedious in the first half of the novel, leaving the back half a slog. To be fair, the fact that the reader wants to trudge through the back half is a salute to Walters’ power of plotting. She is excellent as keeping multiple sources of uncertainty dangling at once, and the depth to which she plumbs the minds (and sometimes the history) of her characters means that many of her supporting protagonists are better sketched than the main protagonist of other books I have read. The quintessential English country village is drawn with fine detail, although the setting is essentially unimportant – the inner workings of all these people is the primary focus. Walters intersperses the chapters with short excerpts from the diaries of the dead matriarch, which serves to give us slowly revealed sources of truth amid all the speculation and uncertainty. As with the soliloquies by the living, however, these tend to become repetitive and after a certain number we know the direction they are headed. It’s not a very thick book, and the pacing is brisk enough, but I get the feeling it would have been equally good or better had it been twenty percent shorter.
The biggest problem, though, is Shakespeare. This is a book that will either make devotees simper in smug sympathy, or have the rest of us (including me) quickly tire of any mention of poor old William. The victim is described as being brilliant, but with no formal schooling, who fixated on Shakespeare, read him voraciously, and quoted him endlessly. She might be dead, but the quotes and parallels simply will not stop. Indeed, without giving too much away I can say that the examination of Hamlet and King Lear, both within the text and as paralleled in the plot developments, are at first a clever writing device but become enormously burdensome by the end. There is something self-congratulatory in all the Shakespeare quotes – Walters is not wearing her erudition lightly, and it makes reading the book less enjoyable. We are beaten over the head with endless quotes, and of course the long suffering policeman investigating the possible crime has to be walked through all the plots and semiotics and psychological analysis periodically (even though he is otherwise a PhD level psychologist who is able to brilliantly determine the inner workings of people based on a single meeting). If we aren’t being treated to characters haranguing one another – if two characters interact in this book, one of them is at least huffy, and usually flat out upset – then it’s back to Shakespeare. As the plot related to the actual death unfolds, it can be easy to lose the moments of intellectual satisfaction amid the sea of psycho-babble and the Bard. Indeed, by the end of the book, when all is revealed, the end result feels incredibly mundane and even cheap. Yes, Walters had given us the clues we needed, but she drowned them in such a volume of speeches and meaningless emotional back-and-forth that it doesn’t feel like much of a triumph. The characters arcs are more satisfying – unsurprising, given the volume of space devoted to them – but the whole construct feels like an elaborate wind-up doll who course is fascinating at first, but quickly becomes the same geometries repeated over and over.
Confused as I am by The Scold’s Bridle, the depth it shows in its characterization and plotting nevertheless put it in a fairly strong position. Walters will reappear with her 2003 Gold Dagger winner, and I’m curious if another decade of writing will place her next entry farther up or down the list.
And then we have Silence of the Grave. This is a novel that has two headwinds from my perspective – first, the fact that was an early book in the wider ‘Nordic noir’ (although this author and book are Icelandic) means that it is pigeonholed in a genre that has faded over the past several years. Secondly, even within that sub-genre, it is overshadowed by the paragons that are Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell. Indeed, one of the few Gold Dagger winners I am not reading is Mankell’s Sidetracked from 2001 because I have seen both the Swedish and British versions on television. Silence of the Grave feels rather perfunctory compared to the best-known Nordic noir books, almost an elaborate exercise in simplicity.
The plot is simple. A skeleton is found on a construction site, and is quickly determined to have been there for some 70 years or so. Meanwhile, we get a parallel narrative of an abused woman and her family, which we soon learn is intimately connected with the same site where the skeleton is being excavated. The police detective leading the case of the skeleton is, you guessed it, work obsessed, unhappy, and haunted by unspecified ghosts from his past. He waxes unlyrical about Iceland as he plods around Reykjavik, coming into contact with some of the seedier parts of the culture as he also tries to locate his estranged daughter.
The problem is that there isn’t much in the way of traditional crime novel plotting. Yes, there are detectives looking for evidence and interviewing people. Yes, the narrative of the abused woman adds a certain amount of suspense and anguish. But there is no “ah ha” moment, no evidence unraveled that propels us ahead. The author has the skeleton, once found, placed in the charge of an archeological team rather than CSIs, seemingly for no purpose other than to slow down the timeline and send the police ricocheting around the city. While transparent, this would be perfectly acceptable if he used that time for some twists and turns, or even characterization, but he doesn’t. It just feels…slow. The red herring subplot is clearly just that from the get go, and adds an additional stand of tedium. The greatest sin, however, is that by the time we reach the end, a character emerges in “present day” from the parallel, abused woman narrative, who clearly holds all the answers. The police had accomplished nothing other than ruling out some suspects, and then this deus ex machina parachutes in to deliver them the whole story (which we, of course, had been reading the whole time). When she arrives, the police still don’t wait around to listen, even! The author tries to force some last-minute twists in, but at that point it is simply too late and they lack any sort of punch. We have figured it out long ago.
Was the story really about all those “winter in the far north” themes? Of the horrible and desolate circumstances that go on behind closed doors? Of these well-off Nordic societies that, like any society, hide the things that fall between the cracks? About the past, and loss? Probably. But it just isn’t very effecting. No one in this book is likeable (with the exception, perhaps, of one of the detectives, but she is thinly drawn and gets very little time on the page) unless they are a victim, but even then victimhood is so clearly their foremost attribute they don’t even feel human anymore. Grim, sad, and slow, Silence of the Grave is almost a caricature of Nordic noir, and while the people of Iceland may very well have found it wonderfully accurate and thought-provoking, from the outside perspective it seems simply to be a forgettable example of a sub-genre of the crime novel.
Two remarkably different books for being written only a decade apart. One excessively wordy and so focused on the psychological that the crime portion, though actually quite strong, feels lost in the shuffle, the other so spare and with so little content that the psychological content, as minimal as it is, is all that the reader is left seeing in light of the complete lack of criminal drama. Though I place them only two places apart on my current ranking, The Scold’s Bridle is clearly in a different category than Silence of the Grave, and I suspect the gap between them will only widen as I continue to work my way through the catalog.
Updated ranking:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
- Mick Herron – Dead Lions
- Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
- Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
- Michael Robotham – Life and Death
- Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
- Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
- Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
- Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
- Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
- Bill Beverly – Dodgers
- James McClure – Steam Pig
- Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
- Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
- Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
- Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)
smq.world 