What Book to Read?

The Raven’s Eye (2013) is the twelfth in Maitland’s series featuring Detectives Brock and Kolla – now risen through the ranks to Chief Inspector and Inspector. It is a textbook British police procedural – despite the fact that Maitland, a retired professor of architecture, now lives in Australia. Unlike most of the earlier books, architecture doesn’t play a part in this one, except, perhaps, by way of an analogy.

The story begins with the death of a young woman on a canal boat. It appears to be the result of an accident, but to Inspector Kathy Kolla, there was ‘something troubling about this death, something that didn’t smell quite right.’ But why are senior police so unwilling to pursue it further? The action then shifts to another, much more high profile case: Jack Bragg, a vicious criminal, is bent on revenge against his ex-wife and former business associates.  Kathy has a crucial role in the plans to capture him, but what is it that neither she nor Brock is being told?

Readers of crime stories know that where there are two cases, however disparate, in one book, they are likely to be in some way connected. You could argue that this is artificial; in real police work, very few crimes of such different natures would ever be connected. But the genre has certain conventions, and this is one of them. While each case has its own trajectory, establishing the connection between them is central to the plot. ‘What the hell,’ wonders Brock, ‘did those things have to do with one another?’ Maitland uses failures in personal and organisational communication to build tension – what are Brock and Kolla not being told? Will this lead to disaster? And they don’t always communicate properly with each other – just tell him where you’re going, I wanted to shout. Maitland is a very competent writer, so the connections are cleverly woven, and if at the end I did think this is a bit over the top, well, it’s no more so than in most police procedurals.

Furthermore, the connections relate not just to events, but to a major theme of the book – technology and the nature of police work.

It seems that as well as dealing with a crime or crimes, most police procedurals flesh out the story with reference to material not directly related to the crime itself. Often it’s details from the detectives’ private lives: they are loners, with shattered family relationships, eating badly and listening to a lot of jazz. In this book, Maitland doesn’t spend much time on private lives. His ‘extra’ element here is the police force itself, and how it copes with restricted resources. And it’s an interesting study. The path he suggests policing is taking is in direction of stringent control of spending and greater reliance on technology. Chief Inspector Brock is uneasy about this. He feels that police on the ground – not police bureaucrats – have the best sense of what’s necessary. ‘More computers?’ he thinks. ‘Nothing to compare with a smart detective with a smart eye.’ Is he, as his boss suggests, being ‘stubborn and intransigent’, not being ‘a team player’?

But technology is pervasive. Bragg is tracked not by informers or whispers on the grapevine, but using technology to collate ‘information from social networking sites, financial transactions, IP network logs, satellite navigation equipment and mobile phone traffic’. Kathy makes extensive use of the internet and aerial photography. Clearly the police must make effective use of the available technology. But the question asked in this book is how far should they go? What is the boundary between public safety and abuse of civil liberties? This is surely a very relevant question for today. One of the senior police officers has an architectural drawing on her wall of the Panopticon, a prison dreamed up by Jeremy Betham in the late eighteenth century, in which a single watchman observes all inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. Is creation of a modern Panopticon a legitimate aim for modern police surveillance? Maitland seems to be acknowledging that technology is vital, but that there are boundaries that shouldn’t be overstepped.

I’ve previously reviewed Maitland’s Chelsea Mansions (2011); you can read the post here. I had reservations about the end of that one, and thought some of his earlier books were better. This one is a fast-paced and engaging read, and the ending, if not perfect, does work better. I see that Maitland has now published Crucifixion Creek (2014), the first of what promises to be a series of three books set in Australia, featuring Sydney homicide detective Harry Belltree. I’m looking forward to it. You can read more about Maitland and his work here.