What Book to Read?

‘Nicci French’ is the pseudonym of the husband and wife team Nicci Gerard and Sean French. Both have published in their own right, but together they have created a ‘third voice, a third author with her own proper style’. Blue Monday (2011) is their thirteenth book, and they have announced it will be the first in a series featuring psychiatrist Frieda Klein.

Nicci French writes psychological thrillers, which open a window into the ‘dark world’ of psychological behaviour that borders on the abnormal, and often enough tips right over into the criminal. In this series, it appears they will go beyond the obsessive love, self-destructiveness, amnesia and criminal insanity found in their earlier books, and embed psychological theories and practices into the plots. Reading this book, I was reminded of Michael Robotham’s Joe O’Loughlin series – a new one of which, Say You’re Sorry, came out in 2012. Blue Monday faces the same challenge of getting the psychology credible, as well as everything else.

The book begins with a prelude set in 1987. A little girl vanishes on her way home from school and no amount of searching can find her, dead or alive. In the present day, another child disappears without trace. Frieda Klein has a patient who dreams of a child who looks like the one that has just disappeared. What, if anything, should she do about this?

Like many psychological thrillers, Blue Monday has many of the attributes of a non-genre novel, including characters with ordinary working lives, aspirations and relationships, and a setting – parts of London – that is interesting in itself both geographically and socially. Frieda is the centre of a web of characters, all interesting and well-drawn, some of whom relate directly to the crime at the core of the book, and others who flesh out her world. It remains to be seen which of these make it into the next book. But the plot is what is really important, and there are some satisfying twists and turns – including one clever but rather nasty surprise. As Sean French has commented, thriller plots must be ‘structurally sound and solid as a machine, yet fraudulent. One of the pleasures of reading is of allowing yourself to be deceived.’

Psychology becomes part of the investigation of the crime when normal police procedures fail. ‘Most cases,’ says Inspector Karlsson, ‘are pretty straightforward. You advance by routine investigation and you follow the rule book. There’s blood, there are fingerprints, there is DNA, there are images caught on CCTV, there are witnesses.’ But in this case, there is no choice but to follow ‘any rumour, any idea, any possible connection … however tenuous.’ Enter the dreams and associations of the unconscious mind. I’m not going to say which particular psychological situation is central to the story, but it is one that I am normally a bit sceptical about. Some hypothetical scientific evidence is presented to back it up, and a search of the Web suggests there may be some real evidence for it. So who am I to say whether or not it could be so? But the important thing is that it feels convincing to me in the context of the story. Even if this form of detection is one of the things that falls under Sean French’s category of ‘fraudulent’, it is handled with sufficient subtlety that is works as part of the plot of a thriller.

Talking about their first collaboration, The Memory Game (1997), Sean French explained that each of them wrote a section, not necessarily in chronological order, and then gave it to the other to work on. He said that he no longer knew which bits he had written, and which were Nicci Gerard’s. I assume they still work in this way; certainly the writing is seamless. And certainly it’s effective. I’m not claiming this as great literature, but it is very well written, and is at least as good as much non-genre writing. It has that mysterious quality of ringing true – the right word in the right place.

Having said I think it’s well written and well constructed, I have to add that Blue Monday is also quite unpleasant. Missing children and grieving parents are a miserable subject, but most good crime stories are about very unpleasant events. So it is more than that. Perhaps it’s that I have an expectation that there will be a just resolution in crime stories, and here I’m not sure there is one. We will have to wait for the sequel to see if what is unresolved in this book is addressed in the next one – Tuesday’s Gone (2012).

You can read more about Nicci French here.