You don’t have to be quirky to be a successful killer in contemporary crime fiction, but it certainly doesn’t hurt – except, of course, for the unfortunate victims. The trick is to be a killer who specialises in bumping off society’s deplorables (drug smugglers, people traffickers, those who are cruder in their use of lethal violence than you, etc.), so that your quirkiness becomes a delightful eccentricity rather than a pathological flaw.
Karsten Dusse’s Murder Mindfully (Faber, £9.99) opens with defence lawyer Björn Diemel stressed to breaking point, largely because his main client is the notorious criminal Dragan Sergowicz, who expects Björn to be available night and day to resolve his many legal issues. When his wife Katharina threatens to leave and take their young daughter away, Björn reluctantly agrees to reset his priorities by attending a mindfulness guru, who inadvertently provides the clarity Björn so desperately needs.
And so, by applying the basic principles of mindfulness – be calm, present and non-judgemental – Björn begins methodically murdering his way towards peace of mind. What might easily have been a one-note joke concept is deftly handled by Dusse, who quickly snares Björn in a satisfyingly tangled mess: one murder requires another to cover up the first, and then another to deflect from the second, and soon our hero is knee-deep in corpses as Dusse teases out a scabrous satire on the pretensions of an ostensibly civilised society.
Florian Duijsens’s bone-dry translation thrives on understatement, and the result is an irreverent, subversive crime novel that never lets its paradoxical conceit overpower the plot.
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Hazel, the heroine of Asia Mackay’s A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage (Headline, £16.99), could teach Cyril Connolly a thing or two about the pram in the hall being the enemy of promise. An artist by day (her art offers “raw, exquisite takes on female rage”), Hazel is a homicidal vigilante by night, joyfully executing “bad men” who prey on women. And then she goes and spoils it all by marrying her soulmate Fox, who is initially every bit as conscientious a serial killer as Hazel, but eventually insists she rein in her murderous instincts for the sake of their new baby, Bibi. But how’s a woman supposed to cope with domesticity without the occasional slashing spree to let off a little steam?
Blackly funny as a marriage manual – knowing your beloved spouse is a proficient killer certainly spices up Fox and Hazel’s occasional arguments in an otherwise humdrum Berkshire suburbia – this is a breezily implausible exercise in wish fulfilment as a crime novel, featuring a pair of self-entitled narcissists who twist themselves into knots trying to justify their sociopathy as a necessary corrective to the patriarchy. It all comes on like Gone Girl with a considerably higher body count, which is its own kind of fun, even if Hazel and Fox seem entirely unaware that they’re not so much a solution to an age-old problem as a whole new kind of problem.
Uketsu’s Strange Pictures (Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99) opens with Japanese university student Shuhei Sasaki stumbling across a blog containing child-like drawings made by a pregnant woman that appear to predict her untimely death. Sasaki and his friend Kurihara have a “shared interest in the bizarre and the unexplained”, and so they set out to decipher the meaning behind the pictures, leading the reader into a labyrinth of loosely linked stories that revolve around interpretations of images that, successfully investigated, reveal the identity of a ruthless killer.
Uketsu – the name is a pseudonym; the mysterious author only ever appears in public wearing a white mask – provides us with the images under investigation, and the blend of text (which is translated by Jim Rion) and visuals is an intriguing gambit. Unfortunately, the images aren’t very helpful as clues, in part because they are drawn to deliberately obscure their true meaning, but mainly because the killer’s modus operandi is eventually revealed to be utterly preposterous.
Sam Blake’s The Killing Sense (Corvus, £14.99) begins with Londoner Kate Wilde arriving in Paris on Valentine’s Day for a short break, having won a competition for a place on a perfume-making course. That the busy Kate doesn’t remember entering any such competition isn’t ominous in itself, but the fact that her violent ex-husband Erik texts her a vaguely threatening message just as her train departs London certainly is. And that’s before the flame-haired Kate gets to Paris, where she discovers that there’s a serial killer on the loose who exclusively targets women with red hair.
Teaming up with Agathe, a local barista concerned about her flatmate’s disappearance, and Daniel, a handsome stranger Kate met on the Eurostar and who is travelling to Paris to pick up a rare bottle of perfume, Kate plunges headlong into the mystery of why a killer might model himself on Grenouille, “the deformed grotesque Patrick Süskind had made famous in his book Perfume”. Blake weaves a number of different perspectives into this fast-paced novel, which features its fair share of (appropriately) red herrings and offers a sharp-eyed tourist’s take on the lesser-spotted backstreets, sewers and grimier corners of the City of Light.
From quirky killers to an offbeat cop: Esther García Llovet’s Spanish Beauty (Foundry Editions, £12.99; translated by Richard Village) introduces Michela McKay, a Benidorm-based detective of flexible morality and a glaring want of vocation (”Michela doesn’t like people who call the police”). This is perhaps unsurprising given that she’s the daughter of a Spanish flamenco dancer who abandoned her at a young age, and an English professor of modern history whose failed opus was an ambitious affair: “The Seven Crowns: a comparative study of Shakespeare’s regicide plays and the London underworld gangs of the fifties”.
These days Michela is battling a Russian invasion of Benidorm, a city that inspires our cynical heroine to wax somewhat less than lyrical: “Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea.”
The McGuffin here is Reggie Kray’s cigarette lighter, which the Russians have and Michela, for what passes for sentimental reasons, wants. A bracing fever-dream pulsing to the rhythms of the rotting heart of the Costa Blanca, Spanish Beauty reads like Raymond Chandler purging himself in the depths of a gin hangover.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
