Only one book this time, as it gave me the most visceral reaction I have yet had. A Fatal Inversion won the Gold Dagger in 1987. Barbara Vine, the purported author, is in fact a pen name of Ruth Rendell, whose 1976 winner, A Demon in My View, has already been reviewed, and whose 1986 winner Live Flesh is still on the “to read” list. As Barbara Vine, Rendell also won the 1991 Gold Dagger for King Solomon’s Carpet.

I only learned about the pen name after I finished the book, and at once I said “of course.” A Fatal Inversion is deeply psychological, more about people and their inner workings than crime itself. In A Demon in My View this was quite interesting because the psychopath was one of the killers. This time around, it doesn’t work – or rather, if it does work, who cares?

My problem with the book is its utter lack of potential payoff. Rendell’s strength to write multiple characters is on display again – here, she writes mostly from the points of view of Adam and Rufus, two men who, we come to learn, committed a serious crime ten years ago, the evidence of which is discovered in the book’s opening chapter. As work through the novel and Adam and Rufus recall and deal with the past in their own ways, we see again Ruth’s talent for seeing the same people and events from two perspectives – sometimes just the same, sometimes different, sometimes distorted as if through a funhouse mirror. The little details are expertly revealed, leading us away from the main narratives for a sentence or three before snapping back into place. The whirlwind of supporting cast members is also a cut above. The problem isn’t in the details, it’s in the whole construction of the book, and while I see why some people would give it praise (or even a Gold Dagger) I found it viscerally annoying to read.

Rendell structures the book with an elastic approach to chronology. We start in the “present” (i.e. 1986) but Adam and Rufus, as they are introduced, are continuously rubber-banding between their own daily routine and memories of ten years ago. Moreover, when we are in the present, Rendell has a habit of dropping references that the characters would clearly understand but that mean nothing to the reader. As one example, Adam and Rufus think of what happened as “Ecalpemos” but we know of no such place – it is only one-third of the way through the book that we learn what “Ecalpemos” is and how it maps onto our knowledge of other settings. Or an idle thought about how one characters hadn’t seen another one bleed, “not until she had taken the boy” and then we move on despite having no idea what that means until much later. The purpose, of course, is to make us want to know, to make us turn the page to connect the dots so we have, at last, a consistent internal geography. I admire the intellectual exercise here, but in practice I found it maddening. There are simply too many variables to have to juggle, and by the time they are all revealed…nothing! Imagine solving a jigsaw puzzle by looking only at the observe side of it and piecing all the cardboard colored rears together. At last, when you finish, you flip it over to see what the image looks like pieced together, and finding out it is simply a blank white canvas. That is the payoff to reading this book. When at last all was revealed (as usual, about 15 pages before the end of the book) I realized that…I didn’t care! The inevitable twist was less impactful than it might otherwise have been both because the manner in which it could occur was severely limited, and also because the characters were so fantastically unlikeable. Not a single person in the book came across as likeable, even the few that one could at least feel empathetic for. This is a remarkable achievement, all the more so in that I don’t know to what purpose!

Crime novels and morals have an uncomfortable relationship, in my mind. Being about crime, they are frequently either black and white (the bad guy gets what he deserves) or revel in the grey (is anyone to blame? Is it society’s fault? Was it destiny, tragedy, some series of butterfly effect chain of events that caused it all to go so wrong?). This book is gray without even the grayness, it is simply bleached of color. Rendell touches on entitlement, money, health care, racism, sexism, religion, mental health, family, children, and other topics I’m sure have slipped my mind. She clearly has points of view to get across beyond simply capturing a vivid setting in which to place her characters. And yet it’s hard to walk away feeling impacted by any semiotics because it’s such a dull exercise – watch two unlikeable, mildly successful men meander through their own memories about a morally outrageous episode in their past while they also meander through their morally unimpressive present. Hip hip hooray. There’s no justice in this book, and even the pursuit of justice feels rather uninteresting given we see it only through the paranoid minds of Adam and Rufus, who wonder if the police are on their trail. It seems fairly obvious, at least to me, that they are not. We have objectivity, albeit it for events we view through unreliable lenses, and the pursuit of justice ceases to be a possible path for the novel about three-quarters of the way in. All that’s left is the characters and that’s why this book felt like a complete slog.

If I had picked this up in a bookstore to read, after the first few pages I would have put it back. There’s no visceral thrill of the chase here – which is perfectly fine – but the exercise of oscillating through time as the characters slowly move forward through the narrative is exhausting. A Fatal Inversion is a clever name for the book given this central device and the importance of “Ecalpemos” (“someplace”, inverted – sorry for the spoiler, but don’t read the book, please) in it, but the cleverness itself feels more the central point than anything else. I am beginning to dread the next Rendell book, because while her style is certainly strong and I can see how her books would be quite groundbreaking at the time, the descendants they inspired make their freshness and perspicacity wane quickly.

A final complaint. The last chapter, which gathers up many threads lost earlier in the book and resolves them, annoyed me. It’s totally logical, and even plausible, but I think it’s supposed to serve as a last, definitive moral statement on the impact the crime had on everyone – the sort of clear statement lost elsewhere in the book’s complex chronology that is supposed to provide light by which all the other characters and their outcomes can be better measured. Bleh. Instead of nodding sagely I felt a knot of anger grow in my stomach.

I’ll save the updated rankings for the next review, but I expect that this book will be one of my biggest departures from common wisdom in that it will be near the very bottom of my list, even though A Fatal Inversion was nominated for the 2005 Dagger of Daggers Award to honor the best crime novel of the past 50 years. No, thank you.

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:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
6. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
7. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
8. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
9. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
10. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
11. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
12. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
13. James McClure – Steam Pig
14. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
15. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
16. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
17. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Two more entries: Michael Robotham’s Life and Death, and Lionel Davidson’s A Long Way to Shiloh, the winners in 2015 and 1966, respectively. I didn’t realize this was the case, as the edition of Shiloh I bought was a reissue by Faber & Faber with a very modern cover – I thought it was written in the 21st century until, a few pages in, the book clued me in to its era. Already I’m giving my assertion from the last review – that I would be unlikely to review two books with publishing years so far apart again – a run for the money, as this is only four years smaller a gap! However, unlike the previous review, these books share essentially nothing, and while Davidson’s style if not his subject matter make the five decade gap feel much smaller than it really is, they remain distant cousins in the greater crime novel family.

Life and Death is effective. It was clear to me only part way through the novel, and even more so by the end. Robotham has written a page-turner in the most literal sense, as I was unable to keep leafing through the book even when, with twenty percent still to go, the outcome was clear. His background as a journalist is clear in the book’s wonderfully clear, almost spare prose. Robotham is Australian; the book takes place (mostly) in Texas, with Texans as the primary characters; Robotham made it clear in an initial dedication that he owes much to Texan writers who came before him, and his attempts to get the flavor and speech patterns of Texas were a decent antipodean effort. However, Lonesome Dove this is not, and perhaps with the exception of scenes in which characters try to speak or understand Spanish – not so different from an Australian learning to speak Texan! – the setting feels fairly washed out. Robotham seems to have wanted Texas to be a background character, as the setting can be in so many great novels, but it never quite gets there. Rather, Robotham’s strength is his characters. He is particularly good with the small details and illustrations that create depth in even tertiary characters. His throw-away lines, suggestions, idle thoughts are excellent, and the actual dialogue almost as good (with the exception of his “Black convict” character, who feels much more two-dimensional than any other member of the supporting cast).

The problem, then, is the plot – which I have neglected to describe so far. And perhaps that’s because it’s the most dissatisfying part of the book, and what makes Life or Death merely good and not great. The pitch is high concept, indeed. Audie Palmer has been imprisoned for a decade, serving a sentence for an armored car robbery in which the millions of stolen dollars were never recovered. The day before he is due to be released, he escapes. Why? Well, the “why” is eventually revealed to us, but it is almost a MacGuffin, something that keeps all our characters in enjoyable motion even if their motives – in the retrospective light of full knowledge – do not quite hold up to scrutiny. A good jailbreak or heist novel is always appreciated, but that isn’t the point of Life or Death. We do have the traditional, dogged, “new to this case, let’s start from the beginning and put all the pieces together” lawman (in this case an FBI agent), the sidekick (the aforementioned Black convict), as well as the usual swirl of antagonists and fleeting acquaintances (oily businessman, corrupt lawman, estranged family, Good Samaritan stranger), but Life or Death is essentially a giant plot device. We start with Audie, having just escaped prison, on a kinetic journey forward physically – with all those characters in his wake – but on a backwards journey mentally. Every time Audie pauses for breath, or sleep, we get a flashback. As Audie nears his physical finish line, the mental journey catches him up nearly to when his time in prison began. The climax is of course Audie himself bridging the gap between the two, made to feel all the more extraordinary because of his flat refusal to discuss anything about the crime up to that point of the novel. It works! Robotham has cunningly embedded a love story to get the reader wholeheartedly on Audie’s side, and while it’s equally transparent as the other ridiculous happenstances that made Audie a Good Guy (135 IQ, hard worker, booted from college because of his criminal brother’s antics), the pace of the plot doesn’t give us much time to roll our eyes at the whole situation. Robotham subverts our expectations by turning what we thought was an escape novel or heist novel into a love story, and while it pulls this off successfully it makes for a rather less satisfying crime novel. If Life or Death is made into a movie, it will be more “The Notebook” and less “Ocean’s 11”. Given I was looking for the latter, there is only so far this book can climb in the rankings before it loses out to more conventional titles. I congratulate Mr. Robotham on his excellent craftmanship, however.

I have to throw in one other point of contention here, however. If I was the governor of a state, and a convict escaped from prison twelve hours before they were due to be released, would I really call in all the law enforcement capabilities at my disposal? How many millions of dollars would I waste on man hours searching for one person who escaped without harming anyone? Am I crazy for thinking I’d put a warrant out for him, shrug, and go about my business?

And then we have A Long Way to Shiloh. Reading this so soon after The Far Side of the Dollar has led me to believe that in the 1960s, people simply wrote better. The prose ages beautifully, and Davidson, while less poetic than Macdonald, manages to do so much more while making it feel light and breezy. Shiloh also grabbed my attention because it felt so familiar – any fan of Indiana Jones will wonder if this book was some sort of source material! An English professor of Semitics goes to Israel to investigate a scroll (what we now know as a Dead Sea Scroll) that purports to hint at the location of the Temple Menorah – that is, the original Menorah forged by the Jews in the desert, thought to have been taken by Titus in the sacking of Jerusalem in the first century AD. But what if Titus’ prize was a copy, and the original was buried in the desert for safekeeping? A few “find and replace” searches in that description, and you have Professor Indiana Jones fighting Nazis to recover the Ark of the Covenant! Davidson’s hero, Professor Laing, leans more into the intellectual side of things rather than the action. He also appears to have a drinking problem and is a well-established letch. Nonetheless, as he rolls through the recently established state of Israel (driven, inevitably, by a beautiful Israeli army officer) the intellectual puzzle remains fantastically engaging. Making ancient scrolls and Biblical goings-on a matter of heart-pumping urgency is no small feat, and Dan Brown surely owes something to Davidson’s ability to condense so much obscure information and make it a delectable mental meal for the reader. Throw in the intrigue of Syrian and Jordanian opposition, and you have a neat little novel. Unlike Life and Death, moreover, Davidson does a fantastic job at making Israel and her people a vivid and essential part of the novel. He deftly integrated descriptions of the far-flung masses – Englishmen, Germans, Moroccans, Yemenis – who have come together to make this new state. There are Arabs and Bedouins, rabbis and businessmen, ancient citadels and modern cities, somehow woven together into a new state that feels bursting with energy even as we explore its millennia old desert canyons and holy places. The cross-section we see feels particularly interesting given we know how eventful the next few decades will be for this young state, and that sense of destiny likely accrues to the novel’s benefit (had it been set in Hiroshima in 1943, for example, the atmosphere might feel different).

Professor Laing is not, however, a particularly enjoyable protagonist. His brain produces the necessary realizations at the critical moments, and he works through the action scenes adequately, but he is certainly no hero. This could have worked quite well – Indiana Jones as more of a mortal – but, alas, he is hard to admire beyond his academic knowledge. Whether it is drinking an entire bottle of whiskey when he goes out on patrol with the army, Uzzi in hand, or his unceasing pursuit of the army officer who drives him around the country (despite her being engaged, she of course eventually gives in to his “sophisticated” ways), Laing makes the reader want to shout “Stop, already!” quite a number of times. It feels less like a predecessor to the self-destructive anti-hero so popular today, and more like self-destruction, period. Laing is not a happy man, and although his detached inner voice has a pleasant sense of irony and dry humor, the intellectual puzzle, rather than the puzzle solvers, are the prime mover.

Alas, the puzzle itself runs out of steam in the final section of the novel. Davidson does an excellent job with the slow unraveling of the incomplete scroll’s meaning, the reversals, the coded language, the setbacks and advances as Laing closes in on things. The climatic scene in unlocking the location of the next scroll, witht he location of the Temple Menorah, is very well executed, and then…everything is wrapped up. It is almost as though the author ran out of creative energy, or ran headfirst into a rock solid deadline. The traditional twist regarding the location of the Menorah is satisfying enough, but the heart has gone out of the book at that point. The efforts of the characters feel half-hearted, and the result – while perhaps poetic – is not quite brought off well enough to leave the reader pleased. (I give nothing away when I say that the book morphs into “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” after starting more like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – this is quite a transformation to undertake decades before either film was written, and not surprising that carrying off such a difficult switch is not entirely successful.) With the plot losing pressure at the last moment, and in the absence of a strong protagonist to carry us the rest of the way, Shiloh‘s end feels like an otherwise wonderful vacation whose final few days were ruined by rain. A good trip, but we can’t help but wonder what might have been.

Even with their flaws, both of these books are very strong. I am unsurprised, and even excited, to learn that both Robotham and Davidson won the Gold Dagger more than once (twice and three times, respectively), and eager to see how their other works will compare. Both are certainly top quality, as reflected in the updated rankings, and without knowing their competition, I still understand why these are Gold Dagger winners.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
6. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
7. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
8. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
9. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
10. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
11. James McClure – Steam Pig
12. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
13. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
14. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
15. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

An interesting pairing this time: The Liar by Steve Cavanagh won the award in 2018, while Ross Macdonald’s The Far Side of the Dollar did so in 1965. The most temporarily separated pairing so far – a gulf not likely to be beaten – but more interestingly, these are the first two I solved well before the ending chapters. Roughly halfway through both I spotted a sentence that was too clearly a gun being put on the mantelpiece, and that was that. My reaction to doing so, however, could not have been more different. Cavanagh’s “tell” sent me from mildly irritated to full blown impatient to be done with the book, while Macdonald’s made me grin somewhat fondly, because I couldn’t help but that think that without the benefit of 55 years of additional novels and storytelling tropes to inform me, he would have gotten away with it.

The other, strangely unifying point between the two books is the plot – both begin with the disappearance of a child from a wealthy household, and track a hired hand’s efforts to recover them in spite of the secrets the child’s parents continue to hold back. While the overall summaries sound amazingly alike across decades of history, the execution could not be more different, and this is what sets the two apart. The Liar is clearly influenced by modern thrillers, and tries to keep a foot in both the legal thriller and action thriller sub-genres. While I admire the attempt, it doesn’t work. Cavanagh, a lawyer by training, simply cannot mesh the two parts together sufficiently well, not least because each part is itself far short of superlative. Ridden with tropes and suspensions of disbelief that are a step too far, it’s hard to get truly involved in The Liar because it is so clearly fantastical. Our hero, Eddie Flynn, is a reformed con man turned defense attorney (this being a book partway through a series, we aren’t privy to the full back story here, but even the sketches we get seem cursory and don’t fill out the background enough to make Eddie particularly sympathetic or even knowable – he does sleigh of hand, hand-to-hand combat, and sophisticated legal strategies with equivalent ease) hired by a high-powered kidnapping specialist whose *gasp* daughter has been kidnapped. Eddie is hired to help get her back. Meanwhile, in the sub-plot that inevitably twines with the main, the reader is treated to flashbacks involving a mysterious arson committed years before, and a devious plot to bring that case to a final end.

I found that device to be crudely effective but, to me, it had a whiff of cheating about it. If part of the fun of books like these is that we move through the present and learn the same facts the protagonist does, at the same time, then planting other pieces of knowledge simply for suspense turns up the excitement at the cost of the intellectual satisfaction. Great writers can pull this off, and even bounce back and forth, but alas Cavanagh is not one of them. His characters are one-dimensional, and we can usually intuit their purpose and ultimate end after their first appearance. The drunken second wife who maintains contact with the mean bodyguard a second too long; the grizzled mentor who lives for justice even if he drinks too much; the opposing council who dresses in black and sneers; the FBI agent who is tough but fair. Nothing any of the characters do is a surprise given the transparent casting, so the plot is left to do the heavy lifting. Alas, The Liar whipsaws quickly between action and courtroom drama, such that we are never able to plumb the depths of what Cavanagh might have to offer us on either side. Moreover, the fact that Eddie is taken to crime scenes as a matter of course, or that he has a legal strategy prepared within seconds of dramatic courtroom events, feels more convenient than convincing. Yes, we know there were months of “off-screen” preparation, but Cavanagh so clearly relies on the shock value of bringing things out with no warning to the audience that the number of extraordinary occurrences compound on one another again and again until our suspension of disbelief is shattered. When I realized the “twist” we were building towards (the revelation of which made all further flashbacks tedious) I immediately knew the marching orders for the monochrome characters, who went about their jobs diligently for the remaining 50% of the book. Eddie as a character was left as some sort of wish fulfillment superhero, with periodically predictable thoughts about his ex-wife and child (surprise, the wife doesn’t like him, the daughter adores him) and…justice on his side? I have to call out one particularly bad characterization. The attorney Eddie faces off with is a woman who wears nice scarves in the courtroom, and has the epithet “The Silk Hammer.” This sort of first draft type material is left in all too often, and then contradicted – as opposed to being a respected attorney, she later morphs into a pathological prosecutor who can’t see beyond her job. At least most of the other characters are one-dimensionally consistent, but “The Silk Hammer” demonstrates the sort of uneven writing that makes this book a tough read. The blurb by Ian Rankin on its cover “Plotting that takes the breath away…” must have been taken either out of context, or with Mr. Rankin under duress. The Liar falls far short of the mark, and while Cavanagh has done a workmanlike job of assembling the ingredients for crime writing, this book reads like he needs much more polish and editing before the CWA should be thinking about awarding the Gold Dagger.

The Far Side of the Dollar, by contrast, stands up as a book whose DNA can surely be seen in its many latter-day descendants. Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer is infinitely more laconic than Eddie Flynn, and yet his character and motives are far more clear. A private detective hired to find a boy who has escaped from a reformatory school (where, it being 1965, corporal punishment is still very much around) Archer becomes entangled with the family as they do as little as possible to ensure his safe return after a kidnapper calls to ask for ransom. In the same way that watching a movie from decades ago makes one aware of changing conventions around pacing and plot construction, reading The Far Side of the Dollar does feel distinctly different – certainly, the opening scene with a security guard who is a World War I veteran immediately reminds us this isn’t a contemporary novel. Without feeling slow, there is a deliberation and spacing given to the book that lets all the characters – even the tertiary ones – live and breath. The prose is spare but stylish and informative. California, a background star of the novel, is fascinatingly drawn from the perspective of the 2020s. It still seems almost quiet, like the echoes of the Old West can be heard if you listen hard enough, and Hollywood isn’t yet a black hole around which everything revolves. Archer is articulate, dogged, and even sensitive. He isn’t an avenging angel, or the sole bearer of the torch of justice in a failing criminal justice system – he does his job and tries his best to get the best result possible. He doesn’t make the job his life, nor is he self-destructive. In his conversations with a former romantic interest and a teenage girl, a friend of the kidnapping victim, he shows himself to be caring, an adept listener, and wise without assuming his is the only wisdom.

As Archer moves deliberately through the plot, we get bits of poetry, philosophy, and psychology. While everyone in the book is clearly a character, they are recognizable as the essences of people that could actually exist as who act according to their own drives, means, and motivations as opposed to bodies that circle the protagonist. This makes the guns littered on mantelpieces far less obvious, although nonetheless there was a degree of specificity to an otherwise trivial piece of information halfway though that gave me an “aha” moment. Even knowing the likely plot outcome, however, Macdonald’s psychological depth made me want to read on to figure out the motive for the crime, and also simply to see how the characters continued to evolve in this state of punctuated equilibrium. This was a good decision because he had one final, elegant twist to throw my way that survives the 55-year gap intact- well done, sir. It is a mark of Macdonald’s fiction that, even having guessed the solution to the primary mystery, nothing in the plot felt inevitable, and that – combined with his lovely style – made reading the book a real pleasure. Looking over the list of books I have completed so far, I don’t think there is another book I would rather re-read (or at least skim for quotes!) save perhaps Whip Hand. The Far Side of the Dollar would never make any list of the most dramatic twists, or thrilling action scenes, or outrageous crimes, but it shows us how high the crime novel can fly by simply sticking to what is real, possible, and all around us rather than inventing unlikely escapades for even more unlikely heroes to address.

Overall, Lew Archer enters the ranking at #5 so far. I suspect, had Macdonald been writing a few decades later, he would be even higher as I cannot but be subject to the biases of my own life and times. For a novel from 1965 to beat out so many newer (and far better known) entries, however, demonstrates the lasting power of well-wrought crime prose – here’s looking at you, Agatha Christie! As for Steve Cavanagh, the effort was simply too sloppily executed. He gets points for aiming high, but he makes us so very aware of what he is trying to achieve that we cannot but notice how short he falls. Then again, Cavanagh is still active so he has the happy opportunity of continuing to improve – we shall see.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
6. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
7. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
8. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
9. James McClure – Steam Pig
10. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
11. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
12. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
13. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Not two, but three reviews this time – say what you will, but nothing builds a thirst for crime novels like reading other crime novels!

I should address the fact that I have realized that is, in fact, the category that all these novels fall into (or into which they fall, as Hitchens would say). The Gold Dagger is awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association. My own particular world view meant that I slotted this neatly under “mystery” but of course there are plenty of spy thrillers and other things that fall under this umbrella, including one of this review’s subjects.

To work: we have Ian Rankin’s Black & Blue, Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, and Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead, winners in 1997, 2016, and 1989, respectively.

I’ll start with Dodgers. It breaks the mold in terms of books reviewed so far in that it is exclusively about a crime, told from the point of view of the criminal. East is a teenage boy in the L.A. drug trade, watching for police as his gang sells drugs in abandoned homes. Sent by his boss (who is also his uncle) on a cross-country journey to assassinate a judge, he grapples with his world and the people in it, including his ungovernable and violent younger brother.

It gripped me more than I expected, but I have to be upfront and say Dodgers is the kind of book I can appreciate without liking one bit. It’s too contemplative, too full of semiotics and unspoken messages, for much enjoyment. That being said, Beverly has very strong style indeed, and given how spare dialogue is, does immensely well conjuring up portraits of the few characters in the novel. The world East inhabits is clear to us but, like East’s own view, the motives and bigger picture are inscrutable at least, verging on completely unknowable at times. The plotting has some holes in it that are irksome, but hard to get upset about given this isn’t really a novel about plot, but one about characterizations and introspection. There’s no crime to solve, and indeed the murder of the judge, which pulls the characters through most – though critically not all – of the book, is clearly so unjustifiable that the frisson of tension around East and company’s ability to pull it off is unsatisfying. There’s not a lot of guilt in this book, just ugliness and truth, or perhaps ugliness in truth. I was happy to reach the end, whereupon I mentally congratulated Beverly on his writing style, but felt sure I would not be picking up a similar book of his ever again.

I had a very different feeling when I picked up Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead: one of cheating. I watched all the Morse episodes based on this series years ago, and more recently the prequel series “Endeavour”. I feel certain I must have watched the episode based on this novel but it was obscure enough to me I felt I could read the novel in good conscience, without considering myself biased. And indeed, nothing was familiar. The setup was also delightfully different, albeit academic to an extent that I suspect those unfamiliar with Morse would find it a difficult entry point to the series. Chief Inspector Morse (now eight novels into the series) is leveled by an ulcer, and while convalescing is given a book about a murder that took place in Oxford – Morse’s patch – around 1860. With the help of his trusty Sergeant Lewis and fellow patient’s daughter (who happen to work at the Bodleian Library and is also, surprise surprise, attractive, and more to the point attracted to Morse) he rustles up enough reference material to solve the murder in the present. Dexter manages to keep this “play within a play” of interest to us by offering access to the materials Morse reads, thereby indicating that the same clues are open to us as to Morse. Nothing is offscreen, and so this consultation of microfilm and century-old evidence is just a real as a gory murder scene witnessed from a first-person point of view. As is always the case with Morse (at least on TV!) the details are what matter and eventually unravel the whole thing, and it’s a clever enough ruse to get a nod from this reader. In the meantime, Morse’s usual attitudes towards beer, women, and details at in play. How three separate women could be attracted to this aging convalescent is an open question, but if Dexter’s desire is for us to suspend our belief for that part of the book rather than the crime, so be it. Each female character is also given enough of a voice that they feel like more that a disposable one-off romantic interest, but if this book passes the Bechdel test it is by the skin of its teeth rather than with flying colors. It was good to see Morse in writing after all these years of viewing – the book really is better than the show, and he comes off as more complex and less cold given the inner thoughts we now have access to – and I am not unhappy to know that one more Morse novel remains among Gold Dagger winners. I look forward to seeing the Chief Inspector again soon!

Ian Rankin is a name I have been distantly aware of for some time, but never really knew. The copy of Black & Blue I acquired has “As seen on TV” at the bottom, and while a number of shows were made based on Rankin’s work they are just old enough that I have no acquaintance with them. As such, this is my first acquaintance with Inspector John Rebus, who I believe has been in some two dozen novels at this point. Coincidentally, this is Rebus’ eighth outing, just as it was for Morse – a lucky number, perhaps? In any case, Inspector Rebus is an Edinburgh-based policeman of a type familiar to us: dogged, disrespectful of authority, and devoted to his victims to the point of not caring for himself, all with a heart of gold (or at least silver) lurking underneath. The template is familiar enough, but Rankin writes so convincingly – with the huge caveat that this is, of course, from an American’s perspective – that Rebus breaks the mold. Mostly, it is Scotland and its character (and characters) that do the heavy lifting. The accents, the drinking, the atmosphere, all are caught in a wild array of direct light and shadow as they stand in the background of this well-paced but quite chunky book. Lurking rivalries of Glasgow against Edinburgh, Highland vs. Lowland, are all a piece as Rebus races around trying to pick apart multiple threads that (surprise, surprise) come together in an unexpected way. Rankin’s plotting is solid, and falls short only on two counts for me. First: I was not aware until I reached the end of the book (and read its acknowledgments) that one of the serial killers Rebus is chasing (Bible John) is in fact real, and did terrorize Scotland in the late 1960s. It’s not that I object to using ‘true crime’ as the foundation for the novel, it’s more that so much of the detail is clearly matter of record as opposed the imagination of the author, which I have always thought is one of the main draws of the genre. However, there is enough fiction in the book that I would have let that go except for one other point: the brief breaks into Bible John’s point of view. They were well written, and provided just enough tension and mystery that they were additive to the book, but I think the book could have done just as well without them (albeit some plot points would have had to change). The Colombo approach – we know who did it and why, and watch as our protagonist figures it out – is wonderful, but I think it needs to be taken from the beginning rather than having glimpses offered throughout. Even so, Rankin’s cast of characters are a step above the usual and their relationships with one another hew more closely to reality than the needs of the story, something I particularly appreciated after having now read a number of books where it is clear the protagonists are the sun around with all other bodies orbit. More so than any other book I have read so far – including Whip Hand, which I judge as being more enjoyable on a stand-alone basis – Black & Blue makes me want to go back to the beginning and see what John Rebus has to offer.

On the the next ones!

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
6. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
7. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
8. James McClure – Steam Pig
9. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
10. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
11. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

At last, two solid books! But immediately, I am plagued by doubt – both of these were written in my lifetime, so to what extent am I simply a victim of circumstance? Had I been born 30 years earlier, would the novels of the 70s be hitting more of a personal sweet spot? I have such doubts as to the worthiness of my ranking! And yet, having set myself the task, I must solider on.

Mick Herron’s Dead Lions and Patricia Cornwell’s Cruel and Unusual won the Gold Dagger in 2013 and 1993, respectively, but despite that they both seem to be wholly modern (with one exception I will come to). Rather than time, it is their tones that set them apart. Dead Lions is very much the updated spy thriller – rather than a single super-agent in a tux, Herron has multiple points of view from his team of agents, all of whom are human, with very human failings; in fact, the concept of the whole series is that the particular agents we follow are the dregs of MI5. Led by Jackson Lamb, a disgusting but incredibly effective spy, they careen around London solving an extremely convoluted mystery that twists multiple times in multiple directions. Jackson’s perfect comprehension of the situation is never in doubt, so the real tension if it the rag-tag team of would-be spies can get their acts together enough to keep up with him. Herron does a solid job juggling half a dozen characters, but they do tend to feel cut-and-paste at times, with a different personal issue filled in to their own particular MadLib character sheet. The quips in particular sounds as if they all come from the same mouth, and as quips are frequently used by Herron to end conversations, it begins to feel like all our POV chapters are a hive mind talking to itself. Nonetheless, the pacing holds true, building slowly but constantly before it comes to a close in the last few pages.

Some of Herron’s plotting devices (a non-existent cat and mouse) as exposition tools feels a bit easy, like he was tired after writing the core of the novel and wanted to give himself an easy intro and outro. Similarly, there are some guns very clearly being put on mantelpieces for the continuation of the series. I believe there are something like half a dozen Jackson Lamb books at this point, and I suspect they would make quite decent spy movies if someone got around to it. It feels, indeed, that they were written in a very cinematic style. We are given no insight into the thought processes of Lamb himself – as he is always three steps ahead, doing so would ruin the plot for the readers – so his dialogue is what we hang on the most. The other characters, less interesting (boozed out secretary, tough lesbian, stereotype subverting Black man, anti-social super-techie Asian man, and so on), die or fight as needed to keep things moving, but Lamb’s grappling with the puzzle is the key piece – without the mystery element, this would be a mediocre thriller at best. The final few scenes where (surprise, surprise) it all comes together are fun to watch resolve, but were so elaborate, and for so little reason (yes, the clues were planted early, but the stakes, once revealed, failed to make my jaw drop) that it became almost academic. Nonetheless, there is promise here, and I suspect I might pick up some more Jackson Lamb in the future.

Patricia Cornwell is more inscrutable. Cruel and Unusual is one of her Scarpetta series, captained by the eponymous Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner (and also lawyer) in Virginia. It’s clear that Cruel and Unusual is well into the middle of the series, at least, from the slightly confusing detritus of previous plots that washes up – sometimes explained, sometimes not – every few chapters. Dr. Scarpetta has killed someone in self-defense, her boyfriend died when a bomb went off, she had a bad relationship that somehow impacted her relationship with her niece, and so on. It’s not that those complexities spoil the novel, it’s that the character herself is really quite…boring. She is clearly extremely intelligent, she has quite a cast of characters around her (Cornwell’s world-building feels more lived in and deep than Herron’s, but it might be down to practice), the plot setup is solid – and yet Kay herself seems pale and transparent as a character. She speaks like a robot, her actions are thoroughly predictable, and while her core is built of admirable ideals she still comes off like lukewarm dishwater. It’s every around her that does the heavy lifting, she seems to simply show up and ask questions that they then answer. She helps synthesize the answers, but it feels more like a dot-matrix printer spitting out a page that an emotional climax.

Cruel and Unusual also hasn’t aged well in several ways. There’s some casual racism about Black people, particularly in the beginning, that is jarring. A victim’s father doesn’t trust Black people; Dr. Scarpetta idly notices to herself that a neighborhood used to be white and upscale – she doesn’t finish the thought but it’s crystal clear how the reader should complete it; the Black death row inmate around whom much of the plot centers seems like a caricature (dumb, rural, immediately became a drunken addict upon exposure to the city, brutally murdered a beautiful white woman). Cornwell also turns the volume up to 11 when it comes to using a character’s word choice and grammar to indicate class. The rough detective who is touchingly devoted to Dr. Scarpetta frequently says “Yo.” in answer to questions, and conjugates perhaps half of his verbs correctly. The precocious niece is perhaps the most annoying character in the book. Before I criticize, I have to see this is, in part, because her area of expertise – technology – has not aged well. The niece understands UNIX, at a time when SQL was an advanced programming language, and so becomes our source of technobabble. Fiercely intelligent, the core idea of the character is sound enough, if already a bit hackneyed, but the execution made me wince periodically – either she was spelling out how tables are connected in the fingerprint database, or she was being our source of exposition for how Scarpetta really felt despite her icy exterior. After a fair amount of time and emotion is spent on this relationship, the niece is subsequently dumped like an overstuffed garbage bag when it comes time for the plot to move on. Then again, this could be my own bias talking! These characters and their relationships may well have been the best thing going, at the time. What I now see as off-the-shelf secondary characters might have been early generations who, copied dozens of times over, I saw on televisions and in other books influenced by this one. I can judge Cruel and Unusual on an absolute basis, but I feel duty-bound to acknowledge that 20-odd years ago, this might have been cutting edge stuff (and indeed, the pieces of the plot involving UNIX probably were!).

As my updated rankings demonstrate, these are solid books, even if Cornwell’s entry feels a bit dated. More to the point, they are both parts of series, meaning that so far 4 of my top 5 books star protagonists that return at least once more. I wonder if this is my penchant for worldbuilding making itself known: I suspect that authors going for a series spend that extra time shaping the ninety percent of the iceberg below the surface in ways that we pick up on subtly. More secondary characters, more relationships, more history – it adds a depth and flavor that is hard to imitate. Also, as satisfying as the mysteries are, when the puzzle is solved it’s nice to imagine that characters who have won us over have a future to walk into, a world of their own beyond being our avatars in a satisfying but brief logical quest. Lots more reviews to come – I wonder if series will continue their dominance of the rankings!

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
3. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
4. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
5. James McClure – Steam Pig
6. The Rage
7. Monkey Puzzle
8. Skin Deep (not recommended)

Seized by a desire for animal-themed mysteries, the next two winners up for review are Paula Gosling’s Monkey Puzzle and James McClure’s The Steam Pig, winners in 1985 and 1971, respectively.

More than their beastly names link these two novels, both of which follow, for the most part, the traditional pattern of following a single charismatic police detective (in fact both Lieutenants, Stryker and Kramer) as he unravels a bizarre case. Both have a loyal sergeant by their side, a powerful sense of justice, and endless energy to chase down the criminals. Interestingly, both restrict themselves to a particular setting that they explore with some depth, a subtle character study of academia and university politics in the case of Monkey Puzzle, and a more bitter than scathing assault on apartheid South Africa for The Steam Pig. Both have their flaws, starting perhaps with the overly elaborate set-up of the initial crime, but both do meander nicely to the final reveal. Both, however, can make for difficult reading, which is why I have a hard time judging them as more than solid pieces of work – perhaps their value is more in their recording of a period of time than in the merits as prizewinners in their genre.

Monkey Puzzle starts conventionally enough – a university professor is murdered in his office and his tongue cut out post-mortem. As Lieutenant Stryker arrives to do his job, it is quickly revealed that the victim was gay but – this being 1985 – the police spit their preferred epithet out with particular scorn. Someone notes that because the victims tongue, rather than his genitals, were cut off, it doesn’t match the “usual pattern.” I wonder if the reader of 1985 would have nodded wisely at this indication that gay men would usually cut each other’s peccant parts off after a murder, but such an early, off-hand display of bigotry immediately unsuspended a large amount of my disbelief. Moreover, as Stryker gathers the English department faculty and intuits that one among them is most likely the killer, it is revealed that one of the professors has a history with him. We know she’s a potential love interest because he comments “Nice ass for a teacher” on their first meeting – thank you, 1985. Her vacillating attitude towards Stryker – it turns out he almost arrested her during a Vietnam war protest decades ago – is tedious, although it does offer a periodic release from the tension of Stryker’s go-go-go investigation. The various faculty members are plausible red herrings (one is described as a “Negro” who is revealed to have also been a professional football player – pulling back that curtain made me sigh aloud) and deftly drawn characters who need not be drawn too deeply as Stryker rarely spends more than a few minutes with them before taking off for yet another interview. There is one faculty member who becomes a suspect early on that Gosling makes particularly unlikeable, but the depth of our and Stryker’s derision comes so early in the book that we know for sure he cannot be the killer. The book suffers from this as we progress, as time and time again another piece of information removes a tertiary professor or comes out against the dislikeable suspect, but we know in our bones it’s all too easy. Gosling tires to have the romantic element of the plot do heavier lifting as we progress, but will-they-won’t-they can only repeat so many times before that, too, begins to feel repetitive.

Perhaps the biggest mistake the book makes is its rear cover summary. We know we are about to read about a murder where the victim’s tongue was cut out, but the summary also reveals a security guard is going to have his eyes removed as well. This particular development comes so late in the novel that it is more a part of the solution than another plot point or mystery of its own, and so makes throws the balance of the whole thing off-kilter. The final reveal is decent enough, but intellectually falls short of the expectations the author has set for us through her frequent references (via the mouth of a faculty member who teaches – hardy har har – a course on murder mystery novels) to other classics in the genre and the rules for writing a good mystery. The tongue-in-cheek references serve as winks to the reader, which is fair enough, but the novel itself doesn’t quite rise to the level of those references. The last few pages created a jarring sense of bathos, especially when the author revealed the original suspect-turned-red-herring was seduced by the gay murder victim years ago and has been ruined ever since. When Stryker, who despite his laughable name is as solid as many other better-known detectives, and his romantic interest finally resolve their differences in the last few lines of the book, it left me pleased he has gotten a good result after so much busy work, but as a mystery I felt it wouldn’t be one of the more remarkable in his career – it certainly wasn’t in mine.

The Steam Pig is different stuff entirely, despite the similarities I discussed above. It is so much a creature of South Africa, and in particular apartheid-era South Africa, that the central mystery itself seems uninteresting at times. To be fair, an American reader who was not alive during the vast majority of the apartheid regime should have a very different reaction to that of a native, or even a British citizen, who was old enough to be consuming this novel at time of publishing. But references to white or “colored” townships, laws like the Immorality Act, the language used by “Bantus” (the K-word is thrown around frequently) to talk to whites – boss, master, and so on – and the attitudes of the characters struck me powerfully. Lieutenant Kramer’s Bantu assistant, Sergeant Zombi, is treated mostly like a colleague rather than a disposable servant, and Kramer himself offers observations – but rarely opinions – on what the system is doing to his country and its people. The crime he investigates – a beautiful but reclusive woman killed with a sharpened bicycle spoke to the aorta – is bizarre and intriguing in its way, but the eventual solution to the crime is so wrapped up in the character of South Africa and apartheid that its conclusion leaves almost no emotional impression, as we know that the system that enabled the whole thing will continue. Kramer and Zombi go on to be the main characters of a series of mystery novels by McClure, and if I continue to read the novels it will be for more of McClure’s ability to capture this moment in time than for his mystery-building capability, which is perfectly solid, even a cut above, but pale beside the setting. His prose, too, seems to reflect its time and place, with language that grates on the sensibilities of the 21st century reader along with wonderfully effective, albeit spare, scenes of different characters colliding and interacting. To my mind, the atmosphere in many of the best murder mysteries is cool, detached, with a dark or morbid sense of humor. McClure’s language is hot, boiling with energy that leaps from the page at times, and sense the plot in unexpected – perhaps South Africa made its way into his very words and cooked off the languor often found in novels from the chilly British Isles. As a mystery, the Steam Pig beats out Monkey Puzzle, if not by much, but its success in capturing a time and place as well as the usual escapist puzzling makes it stand out from the pack.

Updated Ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
3. The Steam Pig
4. The Rage
5. Monkey Puzzle
6. Skin Deep (not recommended)

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:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
3. The Rage
4. Skin Deep (not recommended)

I suspected I wouldn’t be able to wait until all the Gold Dagger winners arrived such that I could read them in chronological order of publishing. At least I can say I know myself. Those first few books arrived, and I leapt in at once – already I have dispatched two off the list. And so, to the reviews!

By coincidence my first two choices won the award only a few years apart: Dick Francis’ Whip Hand of 1979, and Ruth Rendell’s Demon in My View of 1976. I realized this only after the fact, and these first two books have proven to me that two books in the same genre, published only a few years apart, and set in the same part of the world (London) can seem to be from different worlds. Already, reinforcement that “genre fiction” really is an umbrella term for a vast quantity of disparate stuff!

I read Dick Francis first, as I knew he was a favorite of my grandfather’s and this aroused my curiosity. It quickly became evident that Whip Hand is part of series about injured-jockey-turned-sleuth Sid Halley, but the pacing and emphatically “present” nature of the prose never made this first-time reader feel confused or as though I was missing backstory that might add additional depth or pleasure. Indeed, the pacing was spot on and made this book (256 pages) feel shorter than it was. What grabbed me first, however, was how the plot and characterization could have been set – and indeed, I thought was set – in the early part of the 20th century rather than (as seems to be the case) the present-day 1970s. I say this not because it felt stuffy or old-fashioned – far from it. To be sure, the world of horse racing creates a certain timelessness, and that world’s characters (Lords, Admirals, and Sirs abound) leant a certain air of the English aristocratic novel to the whole thing. Only when Sid called someone on his car phone for the first time did I realized jarringly that the novel wasn’t set in the 20s but – flipping to the front to find the year of publishing – the 1970s. This didn’t disappoint me but rather reinvigorated my interest. Francis’ ability to propel the reader’s interest along with Sid, whose point of view we never leave, eradicates almost entirely any need or desire to peer more deeply in the world around him. As Sid rolls through English horse country (and briefly to Paris) we get quick strokes of color – a step beyond impressionism, but only one step – that add just the amount of setting and background we need to watch the interplay of the characters. Sid himself is at core a familiar figure – the intelligent gentleman – but his disfigurement (he lost a hand in a steeplechase accident and wears a prosthesis) is something completely unique, in my experience. Reading Francis’ depiction of Sid’s musings on his electronic replacement and how he and those around him react to it have aged wonderfully, and beyond the technical limitations of the hand itself I never once winced at a depiction or assumption. To be sure, this novel does not pass the Bechdel test. The only women with lines are a bitter ex-wife in need of rescuing by Sid, a bitter wife (of another man) in need of rescuing, and the ex-wife’s flatmate, soon to be the romantic interest of the story (as soon as her skin was compared to an “English rose” it was clear the direction we were going). The dialogue itself is strong without in any way reaching towards an attempt at sounding utterly realistic – it reads like an excellent play rather than a series of recordings some horse-racing anthropologist. Nonetheless, the characterizations are enjoyable, if not overly deep, and the characters are easy to root for or against as they are slotted into their pre-determined places. The cheerful sidekick who knows judo is as reassuring as the oily bookmaker is to loath.

Another point in Francis’ favor is his plotting – rather than one thread to slowly follow, he throws quite a number at Sid (and the reader) quite quickly. Suspicious fellow I am, I suspected we would find some of these threads wound together towards the end and so they did, but watching them fall into place so neatly was satisfyingly enjoyable, without a whiff of deus ex machina or trickery. These multiple threads helped the pacing of the book wonderfully, creating a multi-dimensional tension/release dynamic that kept the book at a smooth canter throughout.

My only complaint with Francis is that the horses were ever-so-slightly underdone. The book opens with a short biography of Francis, who it turns out was (unsurprisingly) something of a horseman. The descriptions of the Jockey Club, the owners, trainers, jockeys, and all the assorted hangers-on, are deftly done and feel perfectly lively. The horses themselves are comparatively thinly sketched, bar a few times when Sid dryly weighs up animals in a way that feels either too expert or too detached to excite the horse-inexperienced reader. It could be that in the 70s the horse-racing world was still sufficiently present in the papers and on television that the average Francis reader would know more than the internet-enabled creature of the 21st century, but given the centrality of horses and their treatment to the plot, one might have expected a few more paragraphs to flesh things out. (The description of ballooning – I’ll say no more, as it’s a fun but important plot point – is wonderfully evocative, so I know Francis could have done more with the horses if he wanted to.)

A final note, the last scene of Whip Hand was curious. I’ll give no spoilers, but Francis has the piece’s ultimate villain display a distinctly un-villainish turn of real-world logic and weighing of scales. It almost feels like a sort of inverted, time-traveling comment on criminal justice reform, but from the criminal’s perspective in 1970s Britain. It’s all a set-up for the last line of the book, however, a benediction of Sid at the hands of his primary foil, but had me tilting my head. A strange note to end on but not an unpleasant one. All in all, I think my grandfather was on the something. Well done, Dick Francis, Whip Hand is a Gold Dagger winner to be sure, and not the last of your books that I shall read.

And then we have Ruth Rendell’s A Demon In My View, a beast of a different kind. I chose it from the pile by a quick scan of the summary on the back, which seemed to be a villains’ perspective of an obsession with a woman he wanted to kill. It seemed like a gorier, darker turn from Dick Francis and I decided to give it a go as a sort of palliative from the smart, resourceful, gentleman detective thing. It was certainly different, but I was quite wrong in my assumptions! Demon is told from two points of view, that of a middle-aged and younger man, both named Johnson, who live in the same small building. I give very little away by stating that the middle-aged man, Arthur, is the killer whose perspective is summarized on the back of the book, but he isn’t some grizzled, mysterious figure. We are given a deep look at his habits and thoughts as he tries his best not to commit murder, specifically by sneaking into the building’s cellar every few nights to strangle a mannequin he has hidden down there. The other Johnson, a new resident, inadvertently starts a chain of events that disrupt Arthur’s decades-old routine and sends everything out of equilibrium.

This is a psychological book to be sure, although it is I think a stretch to call it a thriller. I waited for some spectacular crime to occur, for the police to arrive and a Detective-type character’s point of view at the beginning of each chapter, but about 6 or 7 chapters in I realized it was never going to happen. We alternate perspectives between the two Johnson’s, and the comparative view between them is deftly sketched as they interpret and misinterpret the actions of one another and their housemates. Arthur is almost a caricature with his suit, washing-up, views on propriety, and formal language. The periodic sketches of his background divert us enough into his mindset and how he became a killer that he becomes just a touch deeper than that, and a real tension develops as we watch his routines unwind to reveal what lives underneath. There is murder but almost no gore or violence in the book, perhaps appropriate given the antiseptic lifestyle Arthur leads. Shades of Anthony Perkin’s character in Psycho, perhaps, had he lived with his Aunt in a depressed part of London. While Demons lacks the depth to make the character a true stand-out, the perceived threats posed to and by Arthur make this more of a page-turner than I expected. Rendell throws in an epistolary relationship between the younger Johnson and a married woman he is trying to convince to leave her husband, which adds a needed degree of humanity to the novel, and also serves as a useful (if transparent) plot device – will they, won’t they, how will they once Arthur gets involved?

Rendell also writes with some success on race and class. She has a few good lines from a West Indian (her term) character about how the younger, white Johnson makes unfair assumptions about him because he’s black. Johnson immediately and shamefully admits this is so, and the book moves on. A young Taiwanese woman in the building has some lines that have not aged well (mostly involving grammar and the substitution of ‘L’ for ‘R’) but she is decidedly not a stereotype and serves as a perfectly mediocre secondary character that another writer could have made homogeneously white for ease. Arthur himself is shown to hold racist views in a off-handed sort of way (the moral scales have already fallen against him for his past crimes, so racism hardly shocks our perception of him) and Rendell manages to create a vivid, if small, world in her fictional corner of London. Multi-racial, underserved by public amenities, amidst construction projects that are pulling it from the past to a rather gray present, there is sometimes a flash of menace but more frequently the grayscale picture of mundanity and numbness.

As the plot slowly progresses, the question of course becomes can Arthur control his homicidal urges, and if not, will any of the building’s inhabitants be able to figure it out? The first question is answered fairly quickly, while the weight of the second is held in abeyance for a surprising amount of time, leaving the middle section of novel feeling rather light. Without the tension of an investigation, of someone looking for him, watching Arthur do his laundry and remember his childhood begins to feel a bit tedious. The affair between young Johnson and his potential love interest creates enough momentum to get us to the last downhill section of the novel, with lots of psychological meandering in the meantime, but it doesn’t feel particularly satisfying. As the book careens towards its final scenes, we see our characters in full relief, but they never quite escape the gray tones of the world around them – I was almost rooting for both Johnsons at different points in the novel, but I never quite did. Perhaps that was the point, but it left my thirst for mystery unslaked. The final scene makes you nod in poetic agreement, of course it had to end this way, but despite the neatness of the ending the whole thing ends up feeling a bit too antispetic to make a deep impact, rather like Arthur himself. Ruth Rendell juggled two points of view wonderfully, her characterizations were solid (though in my opinion she did less than Francis while spending much more space on it), her plot intriguingly different, but I am hard pressed to say I would recommend this to anyone who didn’t explicitly ask me for something “different”. The good news is that Rendell has another book on the list (1986’s Live Flesh) so I will get another bite at the apple to see if a different flavor of psychological mystery might go down better.

Two good, but very different, books to start with, and here are the rankings, which I will update with each additional review.

Current ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View

Settling in for a busy couple of work months, and following up on my musings, I bought all the CWA Gold Dagger winners in history (with a few exceptions). The awards began in 1955, and I purchased used copies of all the winners through 2019. The winners I did not purchase were due either to not being in stock (in one case) or that the book in question had been made into a movie or TV series I was already acquainted with (for example, a Wallander novel, or the first Aurelio Zen novel). Disparate arrival times, so while my original plan was to read them in chronological order, I don’t know if I will be able to hold myself to that as the packages reach my doorstep.

I hope these will provide a useful distraction, and by writing about them I can (perhaps) gain some insight into what makes them so successful for their genre.