What Book to Read?

I’m breaking here into a long established crime series. I’d read a couple of the earlier books, and found their detective annoying and their resolutions unsatisfactory. But George was recently recommended to me by a friend, so I decided to have another go at her. And with this 2010 book, I was agreeably surprised.

George is an American who writes a series of what I call ‘augmented police procedurals’ featuring Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers of the Metropolitan Police, London. I use the word augmented because in addition to the police, there are usually a number of other characters with their own stories who carry the action forward, so the stories deal many lives in much greater detail than is normally the case in police procedurals. A number of the police characters are also drawn in considerable detail. This makes most of her books quite long, and in the past I have found they can drag a bit.

This story begins with a section from a report about the brutal murder of a toddler by three young boys. Further sections of the report are spread throughout the book. The relationship between parents and children is a sort of sub theme of the story, but otherwise this report has no apparent relevance to the rest of the plot. It isn’t hard, however, to figure out that this crime is similar to the murder of James Bulger by two young boys in 1993. The young killers subsequently served their sentences and were released from gaol with new identities. About the time this book was written, one of them was returned to gaol for violation of the conditions of his release. I assume George intends the reader to grasp immediately who the character with the new identity is in this story, and what this implies; I think it adds to the tension that the reader knows, but almost no one in the story does.

The crime that the police are investigating is the murder of a young woman in a cemetery in London. The investigation gradually reveals a number of possible suspects, and George does a good job of the misdirection involved in sorting out the right one. Having a number of characters with an interest in the crime allows the reader to see more of the picture than the detectives, and this also works well to develop and sustain tension. I got a bit bored a couple of times, but overall the plot is cleverly put together and provides a satisfying resolution.
Detective Inspector Lynley isn’t very annoying in this book because he doesn’t take the lead in the investigation; he has been on leave from the Met because of the death of his wife, which occurred in the book before last. His place as Acting Superintendent is taken by Isabelle Ardery, and some of the story is about the difficulties she has in leading the team and making the right decisions about the investigation. Lynley is however on hand to advise, and to mediate between Ardery and Havers, his difficult former detective partner. Lynley is of course the aristocratic Lord Asherton (Eton and Oxford), and if this weren’t unlikely enough, he is also compassionate, generous and clever. Only an American could create such an improbable policeman; perhaps George was brought up on Lord Peter Wimsey. In this book, however, she does at least acknowledge the incongruity. One character says to him: ‘You don’t look like a cop. You don’t talk like a cop. You don’t belong.’ ‘How true,’ he thinks. Acting Superintendent Ardrey also realises the anomaly of his position. ‘It came to her that it didn’t matter to him and that likely it had never mattered to him: what threats were used against him to control him as a cop. He was unlike the rest because he didn’t need the job, so if they took it from him or threatened to take it from him or acted in a way that met with his aristocratic displeasure, he could walk away.’ She doesn’t like this: ‘It made him a loose cannon, with loyalties to no one.’ But he has a nice car: check it out.

In its characterisation, setting and complexity, this book aspires to be something more than a genre police procedural. George does well, for example, the contrast between grubby, grimy London and the serenity of the New Forest – though bad things happen in both. I hope George actually visits the sites she uses; I’d hate to think that it was all manufactured. Of course by its nature the clever plot is contrived, but sometimes it feels too much so. You can almost see the writer pulling the strings behind the scenes to make it all come out properly. To me, this sense of contrivance is the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. But it’s a good read, within its limitations.

You can read more about Elizabeth George here.