What Book to Read?

Peter Robinson is a very competent writer of police procedurals.  There are sixteen stories featuring DI Alan Banks before this one (2007), and three more after it. You can read my review of one of the newer Banks stories, Watching the Dark (2012), here. I enjoyed Friend of the Devil, but not as much as I usually do police procedurals. I don’t think this is Robinson’s fault; it’s rather that I’ve perhaps overdosed on the sort of story that seems a natural fit for the police procedural, and this one is a perfect example of it.

DI Banks works out of the imaginary town of Eastvale in Yorkshire. His former sergeant and occasionally on but mostly off again girlfriend, Annie Cabbot, now also Detective Inspector, has been seconded to a neighbouring force. Both are dealing with murder cases. These get alternate treatment until eventually they run together. Banks’s case is the rape and murder of a young woman. Cabbot’s case is more bizarre; a woman in a wheelchair with quadriplegia is found at the top of a cliff with her throat cut. If this sounds familiar, it may be because the book is the basis for one of the episodes in the successful TV series, DCI Banks (2010-14). It is also links back to an earlier book Aftermath (2001), which was the pilot for the main TV series.

Both cases are about sexual violence and murder. I’m not for a moment suggesting that such crimes aren’t horrific; they deserve the maximum of police resources to solve. But I am suggesting that psychopaths and serial killers are becoming the staple of British police procedural crime fiction. There are several reasons for this, all exemplified to some extent in this book. Such crimes are more suitable for police procedurals than they are for stories about private detectives. Police are the ones immediately on the scene. They have extensive scene-of-crime resources, giving them access to DNA testing, and post-mortem results. All these factors are important in this story – though Robinson is clever, and not all is as it seems. In Britain at least, there seems to be an extensive web of CCTV which can be checked for the movements of people and vehicles. This is also important here, and again, Robinson uses it well.  But these resources aren’t usually available to private detectives, so they often need to look at different sorts of crime – ones that the police have missed, or crimes in the past that reverberate into the present.

The psychopath is also useful for the police procedural writer because there is less need to provide a credible motive for the murderer. Murder is what psychopaths do. There are usually a range of suspects, all of whom could be the murderer; none of them can be drawn in any great depth, because giving them depth of character is difficult without giving away too much about possible motive. But any smiling face can hide a psychopath. And so it proves here. I’m not saying that Robinson doesn’t do a good job of hiding the identity of the killer; even after he has identified that the motive is revenge, he still has to make a lot of connections – which of course DI Cabbot is also making – to identify who the killer is. It’s a cleverly put together story – it is just limited by the police procedural form.

Part of what I miss in this form of crime fiction is the ‘state of society’ emphasis that I find in some crime fiction that has a private detective, or is simply a mystery involving someone outside law enforcement. The police procedural usually only does this through the private lives of the police involved, and their formal interactions with the public as witnesses or suspects. We learn quite a bit about Banks and Cabbot; Banks, for example, is reading Tony Judt’s Postwar – a very good choice. Robinson makes implicit social comment, but of only a limited kind. A writer such as Kate Atkinson, for example, is able to write much more explicitly about the society her characters operate in, to the point where in her hands, the crime novel is subsumed into a general literary category.

A further result of concentrating on the psychopath is that other forms of crime are neglected. Where is the police procedural about corporate crime, like large-scale financial fraud, or illegal environmental pollution? Presumably there’s not much of a story in going through bank statements and mobile phone records. A few police procedural writers have however brought such issues alive. DI Rebus has had run-ins with crime that is closely linked with politics. Gangs, drugs and people trafficking also make an appearance in Rankin’s work – which are technically police procedurals. Michael Robotham has also ventured into some of these areas, though the majority of his books aren’t really police procedurals and are anyway often about serial killers. Police forces can investigate only when they know there has been a specific crime; they aren’t usually the ones who identify the systemic problem. This is much more likely to be done by a private detective working for a concerned individual; Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski is easily my best in this area.

Readers can no doubt supply a list of police procedural crime stories which are not about serial killers and psychopaths. Probably I’ve just read too many that are in too short a time.

You can read more about Peter Robinson and DI Alan Banks here.