What Book to Read?

Tuesday’s Gone (2012) is the second in the series of which Blue Monday – I wrote about it a few weeks ago – is the first. I noted then that ‘Nicci French’ is actually a collaboration between Nicci Gerard and Sean French – not that you can pick that there are two writers at work.

The main character is again Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist, and she is again cooperating with Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson. This time the naked and decomposing body of a man has been found in the apartment of a mentally disturbed woman who seems to have little contact with reality. Did she kill him? Karlsson’s boss is keen to wrap the case up quickly, on the grounds that the woman will be institutionalised either way. But Karlsson wants Frieda’s help: ‘She’s got an instinct,’ he says. ‘We’ve got enough people following procedure.’ And things turn out to be much more complicated than they seem at first. Thanks to Frieda’s persistence, the police are soon investigating a number of people who may have had a motive for the killing. But is Frieda even more involved than she thinks?

I noted in my earlier post that there was a thread left hanging at the end that might be picked up again, and this proves to be the case. You don’t need to have read Blue Monday to know what’s going on, because the authors have been quite clever in explaining the carry-over from the first book. Frieda is questioned by a professional standards committee about her actions in the previous case. This not only covers the back story, but also raises a question which is important in the way Frieda is presented in this story: is she acting as a psychotherapist or as a detective? ‘I’m not like a policeman,’ she says, ‘and I don’t want to be.’ But she can’t leave well alone. ‘It would be like going out knowing the gas was on.’ As a psychotherapist, she asks questions of her patients which are designed to help them understand their own situation. Working with the police, her questions can have lethal consequences. ‘You don’t know whether to catch people or cure them,’ says a friend. Self-doubt and even guilt about the outcomes of her involvement make her an interesting character.

The writing in this story is good. Frieda and her friends, Karlsson and his colleagues and all those involved because of the crime are well-drawn, often as quickly sketched in little cameo portraits. The bleak February weather casts an appropriate gloom over proceedings. The physical environment of London, in particular Frieda’s curiosity about its (now) hidden rivers, is interesting. And the social details, like the time and motion study being conducted into the police force, are realistic. The book is easy to read, and while perhaps not a classic ‘page-turner’, has quite enough pace and suspense to make it hard to put down.

But for all this, Tuesday’s Gone is not a novel that I would think of as literature that happens to be about crime, as for example I think Kate Atkinson’s crime stories are – see this post for instance. This is because French’s book remains at heart a police procedural, and operates within the conventions of that genre. Frieda essentially provides new evidence. Though she often acts on her own initiative – ‘you rather like the idea of getting involved when you aren’t meant to,’ Karlsson says – she is nevertheless part of a police enquiry. Furthermore, the plot turns on a convention common in detective stories – though I won’t say what it is.

Perhaps because fitting the elements of the plot together is the main concern of the writers, it has a somewhat contrived air about it. And while it’s all very well for Frieda to do better as a detective than the police because she has ‘an instinct’ – expressed as a sense that something doesn’t quite fit, or someone’s demeanour that isn’t quite right – I’m not sure how long a writer can keep this device going, and keep it credible. We still have Wednesday to Sunday to go, and I’ll be interested to see how they do it.

You can read more about Nicci French here.