It is in the nature of policing, as when writing novels, that the results frequently fail to match one’s ambition. Georges Gorski is the chief of police in Saint-Louis, a nondescript little town in the Alsace; in Graeme McCrae Burnet’s A Case of Matricide (Saraband, £14.99), the chief inspector is privately inspired by the professionalism of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, but finds himself constantly distracted by his own existential ponderings as he navigates the overly familiar streets and bars of his depressingly drab hometown.
The concluding novel of a trilogy that began with The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and continued (after the publication of His Bloody Project, in 2015) – with The Accident on the A35 (2017) A Case of Matricide revolves around the death of local businessman Marc Tarrou, who is discovered dead in vaguely questionable circumstances. Gorski reluctantly lumbers into action: “He wanted something untoward to have happened. Not because he wished misfortune on Marc Tarrou, but because such a crime gave him a sense of purpose. In the eyes of the townspeople, it bestowed a certain gravitas. The chief of police should not be reduced to asking questions about the death of a lapdog or harassing innocent visitors to the town.”
Twice longlisted for the Booker Prize, McCrae Burnet brings a slyly playful quality to his reimagining of the classic police procedural (he hasn’t actually written the Gorski novels, he tells us, but is translating the work of his “Gallic Doppelgänger” Raymond Brunet) and here delivers a wickedly funny novel that owes as much of a debt to Albert Camus as it does to Georges Simenon.
Paula Hawkins’s The Blue Hour (Doubleday, £15) opens with a human bone being found in a sculpture created by the “reclusive, enigmatic” artist Vanessa Chapman. With Chapman long since deceased, James Becker, the curator of the Fairburn Foundation that showcases Chapman’s work, sets off for Eris Island in Scotland’s far north, where he hopes Chapman’s lifelong friend Grace Haswell will be able to shed some light on the bone’s provenance.
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The bait laid – and especially when we learn that Chapman’s philandering ex-husband has been dead for decades, his body never found – Hawkins now pulls an impressive switch, introducing Vanessa Chapman herself by way of diary entries, Haswell’s memories and Becker’s detective work among the trove of papers he discovers on Eris Island.
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Hawkins delivers a satisfying mystery thriller as various revelations about Chapman’s mercurial personality and Haswell’s overweening sense of entitlement come to light, but she also digs deep into Chapman’s creative process, allowing us to peek behind the curtains at the messy business of making art (or, for that matter, writing fiction).
Ian Rankin’s 25th novel in the John Rebus series, Midnight and Blue (Orion, £25) is easily the most idiosyncratic, given that it opens with Rebus serving a life sentence at HMP Edinburgh for attempted murder. Shortly after Rebus is moved from his secure cell to the general population, fellow inmate Jackie Simpson is found murdered in his cell. There are no witnesses, and the nearest CCTV camera is not working, which means suspicion falls on inmates and prison officers alike. Encouraged by the prison governor to be his eyes and ears, Rebus embarks on his most dangerous investigation yet.
It comes as something of shock to realise that Rebus is “a retired cop who’s pushing 70″, but there’s life in the old dog yet, and especially when Malcom Fox, Rebus’s old sparring partner, is lurking on the fringes of the case with a vested interest in its not being solved.
Meanwhile, Rankin cleverly integrates Rebus’s prison-based case into a wider investigation into organised crime and pornography exploiting Edinburgh’s vulnerable teens, which is led by Rebus’s former protege Siobhan Clarke, a woman who is every bit as dogged as Rebus but who still resists the temptation to “cross the occasional line” in pursuit of a result. What follows is a very fine hard-boiled novel that showcases Rankin’s skill as a deceptively laconic storyteller: Rebus may be creaking at the knees, but Rankin has fire in his belly still.
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The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit Press, £9.99), the debut of IS Berry, a former CIA operations officer who worked in Europe and the Middle East, is set in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2012. Shane Collins is a CIA case officer tasked with running informants who provide intelligence on the rebels agitating to overthrow the US-backed regime of King Jassim, with Tehran casting a long shadow across events in the tiny island country.
A career spy running to seed, Collins is a functioning alcoholic, happy to tick off the endless days until retirement, when a chance encounter with the mosaic artist Almasia changes his perception of himself, his role and his place in the world.
Berry’s scathing treatment of the American “ex-pats” who treat Bahrain as an exotic playground is reminiscent of John le Carré's early novels as he grappled with the consequences of the colonialist mindset raging at the dying of the light, but her real strength is in her characterisations. Whether or not she is drawing on personal experience, the Kafkaesque shadow-world inhabited by her CIA spooks not only has the unmistakable ring of authenticity, but propels us right to the heart of a people’s revolution as the tide of history comes rushing in. The result is the most impressive debut of the year to date and a spy novel to rank alongside the best of Mick Herron’s Slough House series.
The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place (Bloomsbury Circus, £22) is Kate Summerscale’s most affecting historical true crime since The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008). It is, as Anthony Berkeley Cox (aka the mystery fiction author Francis Iles, and one of dozens of sources cited by Summerscale) observed at the time, “a kind of inverted murder story”: we know from the outset that John Reginald Christie was found guilty in 1953 of a series of macabre murders at 10 Rillington Place in the staid locale of London’s Notting Hill. But why? What could possibly have motivated an ostensibly ordinary and nondescript man, “a former choirboy and boy scout”, to fill “that grim, body-ridden house”’ with corpses stuffed under the floorboards and behind the walls?
Summerscale follows in the footsteps of two then-contemporary investigators, crime reporter Harry Procter of the Sunday Pictorial and the novelist Fryn Tennyson Jesse, as she pieces together Christie in the way you might try to repair a smashed mirror: no matter how well the pieces seem to fit, the overall impression is that of disturbingly multifarious personality who seemed, while on trial, “a bemused spectator of his own atrocities”.
But The Peepshow isn’t simply about Christie and his murders. Summerscale also investigates a possible miscarriage of justice that resulted in another man being hanged for one of Christie’s murders, and also explores the era’s naked racism, its demonising of sex workers, and the media frenzy that surrounded murder cases in the “brutish new era” following the second World War. All told, it’s a masterful piece of work.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
