It's not often a crime novel references Henry James, EM Forster and Laurence Sterne, but Laura Vaughan's debut, The Favour (Corvus, £14.99), is saturated in allusions to great art as it follows a group of wealthy students – "the Dilettani" – on a gap-year version of the Grand Tour.
Aspiring author Ada, once of the impoverished aristocracy but now reduced to living in London’s suburban hell, considers herself “a frustratingly unreliable narrator” in her own attempts to write, but she makes for an engaging guide to the wonders of Rome, Florence and Venice as the party bickers its way through Italy towards the tragic event that will define their lives for decades to come.
Not content with a gripping plot, fascinating characters and a glorious backdrop, Vaughan also avails of the “obsession with illusion” that characterised many of the innovations of the Renaissance to beguile the reader even more. It’s a hugely ambitious debut and one that delivers handsomely on its promise as Ada, fallen from grace but surrounded by those she believes to be her true peers, scrabbles to reclaim her paradise lost.
For all its many literary references, The Favour’s glaring omission is that of Donna Tartt, fans of whom will find much to enjoy here.
The "cult" of the fictional London Russian Ballet, dominated by the Svengali-like Nikolai "Nicky" Kirilov, provides the backdrop to Erin Kelly's Watch Her Fall (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The ruthless Nicky "knows about the culture of fear", his daughter Ava tells us: "You don't get to be the best without being the worst," having finally ascended through the ranks to become prima ballerina in Nicky's forthcoming production of Swan Lake.
That ballet, of course, lends itself to binary contrasts of black and white, good and evil, but don’t be fooled: here Kelly offers a nuanced account of the lengths to which dancers will go – or are driven to – when ambition is transmuted into obsession.
It’s no criticism to say that the crime fiction aspect of the plot takes second place to Kelly’s character study of Ava, who is a fascinating blend of control, power and precision in the public sphere, but who is privately plagued by neuroses and the knowledge that she is as expendable an element of Nicky’s grand vision as any other dancer. The result is a noir pas-de-deux that overflows with femmes fatales, but one written with a compassionate understanding of the intolerable pressures ballerinas must learn to live with.
Violent abduction
Inga Vesper's The Long, Long Afternoon (Bonnier, £12.99), set in California during the summer of 1959, revolves around the disappearance of Joyce Haney, who vanishes from her apparently idyllic suburban home, leaving behind hard evidence of violent abduction and enigmatic hints that Joyce was secretly rebelling against the behaviour that her society expected of a dutiful wife and mother.
Hardboiled detective Mick Blanke is assigned to the case, the key to which is Ruby Wright, the black hired help who observes events from a very different perspective to that of Blanke. The result is a kind of pulp noir version of The Stepford Wives, with Vesper weaving in themes of women’s empowerment, institutionalised racism and the redemptive power of art.
With a few notable exceptions, the classic hardboiled era was the province of white male authors; here, much like young Ruby Wright, Inga Vesper looks askance at the conventions, and reconfigures the template with a timely and refreshing debut.
The year might be 1985, but cold war veteran Alex Garin – Russian-born, America-raised – still cleaves to Moscow rules in Paul Vidich's The Mercenary (No Exit Press, £9.99). A senior KGB officer, codenamed Gambit, gets word to the CIA that he wants to defect and requests that Garin oversee the operation. This despite the fact that Garin's last operation on Russian soil is considered a disaster by Americans and Russians alike.
Vidich alludes to a number of his spy fiction predecessors during the novel: Gambit is a “billion-dollar spy”, which calls to mind the real-life defector Adolf Tolkachev but also Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain; Garin is mistrusted on both sides as a potential “Manchurian Candidate inside the CIA”.
That said, the laconic Garin is even more of a throwback, a strong, silent type in the mould of James Bond who is not averse, even when he suspects he is being played, to bedding the gorgeous Natalya. Where Mick Herron, for example, might write spy fiction with a knowingly arch appreciation for how the reader’s understanding of the Great Game has changed in the past few decades, Paul Vidich delivers a spy yarn that revels in the old certainties.
Elusive motives
By way of contrast, Sergei Lebedev's Untraceable (Apollo, £14.99) employs the spy fiction form to suggest that characters' motives are elusive and protean, and virtually impossible to pin down.
Prof Kalitin, the inventor of Neophyte, is a scientist who defected to the West during the chaotic years of perestroika. When his cover is blown by the unrelated death of a fellow defector, Lieut Col Shershnev, a veteran of the Chechnyan conflict, is dispatched to Germany to eliminate Kalitin before he can disappear again.
And so begins a cat-and-mouse hunt that is almost entirely concerned with exploring the psychology of the cat and the mouse, and opens up an investigation into the use of chemical warfare that extends from the trenches of the first World War to poisons allegedly employed by Russian hit squads on foreign soil.
The novel opens with an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust, and much of the story is concerned with the pact one signs with posterity when certain crucial decisions are made. Kalitin, in creating untraceable death, has transgressed against the universe: “He understood that the appearance of death, its eternal fate to leave traces, be known, is a natural good, the red signal thread woven into the fabric of the world.”
Untraceable, beautifully translated by Antonina W Bouis, is spy fiction of the highest calibre.
Surprisingly tender
"Freedom could be a terrifying thing," muses Millicent Spark in Chris Brookmyre's The Cut (Sphere, £18.99). Recently released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence for a murder she's almost certain she didn't commit, septuagenarian Milly finds a reason to abandon her plan to kill herself when she discovers the possibility of clearing her name.
Aided – but largely abetted – by her new housemate, the university student, occasional thief and horror movie fanatic Jerry, Milly sets out to track down the surviving cast members of the film Mancipium, the supposedly cursed horror flick she was working on as a make-up artist when she woke up one morning with a dead man beside her in bed.
The Cut is Brookmyre’s 21st novel, but there’s no sign yet that he’s running out of irreverent, inventive plots and characters. Milly and Jerry make for a fabulously incongruous pairing as they bond across the generations, and Brookmyre spins out a blackly comic yarn as the duo pursue their respective ambitions from Glasgow to Paris and on to Rome and Pompei.
The Cut is littered with references to cult film classics, some of which are created by Brookmyre himself. A smart, sassy and surprisingly tender crime novel.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
