People Matter: Keeping Bad Company

Keeping Bad Company by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 311

This Fran Varady Crime Novel is the second in the series. The reader is clearly expected to have some knowledge of the character, but the novel stands up even without it. Fran is an out-of-work actor living in squats and having run-ins with police. “I knew enough to keep clear of trouble. I can’t help it if trouble sometimes seeks me out.” She has an Indian friend, Ganesh, a decent set of morals, firm opinions, a sardonic outlook on life, and occasional flashes of humour. As the novel is narrated from the first-person perspective, the reader is naturally drawn to her.

While waiting at a station she buys a cup of coffee for a homeless man, Albie, who tells her he witnessed a kidnapping. She believes him, although no one else seems to, and when she decides to look more closely into the matter, Albie winds up dead. Fran senses she may be in danger herself as she meets kidnappers, ransom hunters, distressed parents, and uninterested police officers. She quickly learns that no one trusts anyone else. She particularly doesn’t trust men, and their violence and intimidation are treated almost casually. 

She baldly asserts, “If you’re a young woman and live alone, as I did, the risk of a stalker hanging around the place is always there. They see you around the area, follow you home. Sometimes it gets no further than that. They get bored and seek out other prey. Or they get frightened off.” It is a depressing fact that she needs to know this information. “Noise is a weapon. If you can’t do anything else, yell. It disorientates, frightens, and above all, attracts outside attention.” We were all taught this as young women.

Her politics are socialist-leaning, and she despises those who can see no further than their comfortable lives. “It’s a fact that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. Beggars can’t be choosers they say, and I bet ‘they’ are comfortably housed.” Being an artistic and creative type, her motivations are less consumerist. They assume we all want the things our consumer society reckons essential to health and happiness. But what about the ability to find hope and happiness in little things?”

Her world is one of corner shops, basement flats, disused warehouses and greasy-spoon cafes. She refers to one of the pubs she frequents as “resolutely downmarket. That’s what its patrons like about it. Everywhere else around has been gentrified, yuppified or poncified. The term depends on whether you’re an estate agent or one of the Rose’s regulars.” Her language is generally straightforward with the occasional glimpse of imaginative prose.

This is an immediate environment and a likeable central character, who gets caught up in criminal acts through no fault of her own. There are seven books in the series of the Everywoman – I shall seek out more.

Serial Killer: The White Cottage Mystery

The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham

Penguin

Pp.139

The blurb on the back of the book informs us that, “The White Cottage Mystery was Margery Allingham’s first detective story, published initially as a newspaper serial. Her sister Joyce has now skilfully revised the text to reveal a sharply plotted period piece stamped with the genius of a great and familiar hand.” Mostly this revision is apparently removing some of the repetition which would occur in a serialisation to remind readers of the story from last week rather than the previous page.

It is a country house mystery of the type favoured by the Queens of Crime and follows the formula expertly. The blurb also summarises, “Seven people might have murdered Eric Crowther, the mysterious recluse who lived in the gaunt house whose shadow fell across the White Cottage. Seven people had good cause. It was not lack of evidence that sent Detective Chief Inspector Challenor and his son Jerry half across Europe to unravel a chaos of clues.” The clues involve people trying to cover their secrets, such as blackmail, homosexuality, adultery, class pretence, and other sins. Attitudes may have changed, but the well-plotted drama and general motivation to keep things hidden remains.

On one occasion, W.T. Challenor is exasperated with a woman who doesn’t appear to grasp the sliding scale of the importance of secrets. He tries to explain, “An elephant is large compared with a mouse, but it is ridiculously small compared with Mount Etna. That secret may have been immense six months ago, but now we are faced with a larger and much more terrible secret. Don’t you realise what a murder means?” Women frequently exasperate W.T., and he dismisses them as stereotypes. “Grace Christensen was a woman of the pretty, graceful, feminine type that is not too clever.” Other of-the-era outlooks are reserved for foreigners and ‘abroad’, where father and son head later in the novel to track down a suspect. There is an unwritten code of conduct and honour, which is also familiar from early 20^th century novels. W.T. states plainly, “I am an Englishman, and we like our facts like our food – without subtlety. If you will honour me with your trust you will find that I shall respect your confidence.” Far more serious is the stance towards childhood trauma and the notion that the best way to approach distressing events is to forget them.

As with all Golden Age detective mystery fiction, however, the crime is treated as something of a game. W.T. muses on the suspects, “They all behave as if they were innocent, and yet each one is hiding something. Each has a motive for killing Crowther, and admits it freely. No sane person would dare to do that unless they felt safe.” It is, of course, baffling to the duo attempting to solve it. The White Cottage Mystery is a gripping, short caper, capable of being consumed in a day, and the fine plotting ensures that everything is neatly tied up with a bow after all. This is highly recommended for fans of the genre.

How to Survive in Suburbia: Takes One to Know One

Takes One To Know One by Susan Isaacs

Grove Press UK

Pp. 355

Corie has retired from her role as a counter-terrorist agent for the FBI to become a wife to federal judge, Josh, and a mother to his daughter, Eliza. Although she still does some consultation work for the FBI, she ostensibly leads the perfect suburban life complete with a dog called Lulu, a ‘cover’ job recommending Arabic literature to a publishing house, and weekly lunch meetings with fellow freelancers at a French restaurant. And she is bored senseless. So, when she suspects a member of the group of being up to no good – he always picks the same seat to watch his car, changes phones often and makes frequent interstate trips – she imagines that he must have a secret life, and she sets out to investigate. Are her instincts, honed by training at the Bureau, correct, or is she desperately trying to create some excitement, and Pete from packaging really is simply bland?

Corie had approached marriage and suburban life with positivity and enthusiasm, but now she struggles to feign interest in her new environment talking about children’s homework and kitchen renovations. “I had opted for normality and gotten far better than I’d dreamed of. But the trade-off was giving up exciting, sometimes risky work and leaving the exploits to someone else. For family’s sake. Adventure for moms? The dads got that one.” So, she begins to examine Pete and his potential motives more closely. She thinks he may be creating an alter-ego to conceal his nefarious purposes because she recognises behaviour patterns she has displayed – hence the title.

The author includes a lot of research as to the way that agents conduct their business, and, while Cories makes sardonic remarks about some of the training she received – “The bureau had been big on mindfulness, though they called it something more butch back then: staying in the alert zone” – her instincts also lead to valuable insights. Corie confides in her father, who is ex-NYPD and loves watching cosy British crime shows like Father Brown and Death in Paradise. “Like a lot of cops, he was a major mystery fan.” He reads Sherlock Holmes and puts some of the elimination processes to work, casting a net and then narrowing it.

The novel contains some typos and grammatical errors that should have been corrected by a more watchful editor, but these are mitigated by the fact that, as mentioned in the acknowledgement at the end, some people made donations to Long Island charities by bidding to have a character named after them, which is a great idea. This is a very easy-to-read novel, which combines the excitement of law enforcement with the tedium of suburban domesticity. It may hurry to its conclusion, but the characters are warm and engaging, which makes them enjoyable company.

Gender Violence Packaged As Entertainment: The Silent Wife

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

Harper Collins

Pp. 476

This is the tenth novel in the Will Trent series and comes with an expectation that the reader knows and cares about these characters. Without the prior knowledge, that’s a pretty hard sell. In an author’s note at the end, Karin Slaughter claims she writes love stories. “Really gritty, violent love stories, but still.” If love stories come with lashings of violence against women, then we might have to accept this claim, but it is depressing and disturbing for all that. The basic premise is that a man kidnaps women, leaves them drugged and immobilised, then returns to repeatedly rape them – he is found and imprisoned, but ten years later (while he is still in prison) similar crimes start up again – did they get the wrong man?

The novel alternates between times frames and returns to the cold case, which featured all the same characters but in different roles. Then, Jeffrey was investigating the case and was married to Sara. Now, Jeffrey is dead, and Will is in charge of the case with his professional partner, Faith. Will is romantically linked with Sara, the medical examiner. If there were mistakes made in the previous case, Will tries to shield Sara from errors her husband might have made. There were also glaring oversights made by Lena (such as assuming the victim was dead when she wasn’t), for which Sara cannot forgive her. Lena is still in action and pregnant, and this seems to rankle everyone, which indicates they are suffering serious trauma from a past the other books might explain if there were any interest in finding out.

In 2018 The Staunch Prize was introduced for the best thriller ‘in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered’. The founder, author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless, went on to say, “As violence against women in fiction reaches a ridiculous high, the Staunch Book Prize invites thriller writers to keep us on the edge of our seats without resorting to the same old cliches – particularly female characters who are sexually assaulted (however ‘necessary to the plot’) or done away with (however ‘ingeniously’).” It closed in 2022. Not enough entries? Some claimed it was a ‘gag order’ and the case for violence against women should be raised and addressed through fiction, even if these tropes are used as entertainment.

The Silent Wife is worth considering in this light. It begins with a woman running through the woods being stalked by a man who will brutally assault her. Rape and violence towards women are central to this novel, written by a woman. Will feels the need to point out that all rape victims are different. Might that be because they are human beings as well as ‘victims’? “Some were angry. Some entered into a fugue state. Some wanted revenge. Most desperately wanted to leave. A few had even laughed when they told their stories. He had noted the same unpredictable affects among veterans returning from war. Trauma was trauma. Every person reacted differently.”

Of course, there are plenty of police procedural tropes throughout the novel with that hard-bitten tougher-than-nails attitude Americans like to portray. One can almost hear the actors barking out the empty words on interchangeable TV programs NCIS/ CSI /SVU such as, “We don’t have bodies or crime scenes. We have guesses and a spreadsheet. The families deserve answers and this is the only way to get them.” Cops go undercover and put themselves in danger with hidden microphones seeking a confession that will result in a death penalty. They maintain that tough exterior with flippant wisecracks.

The novel is fast paced with characters superficially caring about the victims. The reader is supposed to care about the characters. It’s hard to differentiate any of them from each other, and the dialogue is written with an eye to the TV adaptation. It leaves a sensation of empty fatigue and a knowledge that as long as people are entertained by this style of violence, it will continue. The consumer may pretend to be horrified, but by treating this as a titivation, we are part of the problem.

Friday Five: Books read in March

 

1. Iron by Rona Munro (Nick Hern Books) - This play for four actors, mainly concerns a mother daughter relationship as Josie goes to visit her mother, Fay, in prison for the first time in 15 years. Fay is imprisoned for the murder of her husband, Josie's father. Throughout the course of the play, set mainly in the visiting area, the two try to learn about each other, with Fay asking for details of Josie's life in an attempt to live vicariously through her experiences and Josie asking for annecdotes of the childhood she can't remember. Meanwhile the guards interject as all privacy is removed and people question motive and emotion. Fay tells Josie,  “It’s not the zoo, you know, you can’t come in when the fancy takes you and throw me a bun!” The dialogue is grim and brittle with rapid shifts of mood and tone as the playwright questions boundaries and how we would react if we are pushed beyond them. 
2. Outspoken by Father Rod Brown (Ebury Press) - I have a signed copy of this book from when I saw Father Rod speak at the Canberra Readers and Writers Festival in 2019. Rector of Gosforth Parish, Father Rod is most known for putting up billboards with pithy sayings espousing love and tolerance, and denouncing bigotry and hate, 'because justice is always social'. The story begins with his autobiography, and then moves into a call for a discussion about morals and faith, and how he believes they relate to issues such as migrants, marriage equality and the review of child abuse within the church. While holding onto his values, theology, and decency, he rejects much of the Bible-thumping conservatism often equated with Christianity. He is actually the Anglican priest we should welcome into our hearts and homes for thoughtful and rational debate in a space of respect and compassion for all. 
3. The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham (Penguin) - Margery Allingham’s first detective story, published initially as a newspaper serial,is a country house mystery of the type favoured by the Queens of Crime and follows the formula expertly. The blurb on the back summarises, “Seven people might have murdered Eric Crowther, the mysterious recluse who lived in the gaunt house whose shadow fell across the White Cottage. Seven people had good cause. It was not lack of evidence that sent Detective Chief Inspector Challenor and his son Jerry half across Europe to unravel a chaos of clues.” The clues involve people trying to cover their secrets, such as blackmail, homosexuality, adultery, class pretence, and other sins. Attitudes may have changed, but the well-plotted drama and general motivation to keep things hidden remains. As with all Golden Age detective mystery fiction, the crime is treated as something of a game. W.T. muses on the suspects, “They all behave as if they were innocent, and yet each one is hiding something. Each has a motive for killing Crowther, and admits it freely. No sane person would dare to do that unless they felt safe.” It is, of course, baffling to the duo attempting to solve it. The White Cottage Mystery is a gripping, short caper, capable of being consumed in a day, and the fine plotting ensures that everything is neatly tied up with a bow after all. This is highly recommended for fans of the genre.

4. Cat vs Cat: Keeping Peace When You Have More Than One Cat by Pam Johnson-Bennett (Penguin) - This is a practical book full of information about feline dynamics and how to handle them. It covers topics from introducing a new, younger, cat to the household where there is already an established resident (and why you might choose not to do that in the first place) to calming a scared or anxious cat, and the trouble with anthropomorphosising your pet. The main piece of advice is to always give the cat a choice (including plenty of places, on a variety of levels, to hide, if that's what they want) and provide enough resources that the cats don't have to share. This includes food and water bowls, litter trays and human playtime or interaction. Cats will happily curl up to sleep and groom together, but they always need their own space and independence. I respect that.
5. All That I Am by Anna Funder (Peungin) - First published in 2011, this novel about characters involved in left-wing activism in 1930s Germany received stacks of awards in Australia, including the Australian Book Industry Award Book of the Year. The author is Australian. The four main characters are forced to flee Munich and become exiles in London. Based on real people, the fictionalised version of their lives seems simultaneously sanitised and dramatised for clearer narrative. Justifiable paranoia and a sense of betrayal afflict the remaining members of the once tight-knit group who narrate their stories in alternate chapters from Sydney and New York. It's gripping with elements of secrecy and espionage with a high sense of danger. Of course I was far too contrary to read it when it was on everyone's book pile, and more than ten years on, I wonder if it still meets all the hype.

Unconvincing Café Crime: The Secrets of Strangers

The Secrets of Strangers by Charity Norman

Allen & Unwin

Pp. 334

Published in 2020, this fast-paced action novel about five strangers held captive by a gunman in a London café instantly recalls the Lindt Café siege in December 2014, when a lone gunman held hostage ten customers and eight employees of a chocolate café in Martin Place, Sydney, Australia. There have doubtless been many events such as this in London, but the novel doesn’t feel as though it is set in that city at all – there are no landmarks or sense of place, the people are caricatures rather than characters, and there is a reference to playing soccer, betraying the fact that the author has lived in New Zealand for the past twenty years.

The novel is written in the present tense and structured in short chapters with different third-person-omniscient perspectives to make it feel immediate and resemble a TV drama or a play. Neil is an erstwhile teacher, now homeless due to a gambling addiction, Abi is a defence lawyer, Mutesi is a Carer at an aged care facility, Sam is the gunman who has shot Robert, the café owner, and Eliza is the police negotiator.

The most interesting and believable of these characters is Eliza, who is co-ordinating between the gunman on the phone and those directing the police operation on the ground. Tension abounds when they want to enter the building although she cautions against it. Her communication with Sam must be rational and calm as she tries to establish a rapport and get to the crux of the matter.

Everyone has the capacity for both good and evil and Sam is plagued by memories of a two-faced puppet, an obvious metaphor for his relationship with his manipulative step-father. The owner of the café, Robert, whom everyone thought was a good guy, is actually a snake and uses coercive control on his partners. He’s a narcissist and a sociopath, and few people can see through him as he gaslights women (including Sam’s mother) and convinces them they have gaping holes in their memory and forget whole conversations.

In a very conventional outlook, we are guided to believe that children are the future and the reason for living. Mutesi is only afraid for her grandson; Abi is undergoing IVF in a desperate attempt to conceive which has taken over her life and that of her partner, as if she is nothing without offspring.

The situation is extremely unrealistic, with sympathetic cups of tea; coherent stories told and a neat tying-up of ends. In a cosy conclusion it provides a satisfying story (no innocent bystanders are shot) and we are almost directed (the words is used advisedly) to feel sympathy for Sam because of the incidents in his past. Although it is dangerous to assign labels if one is not a clinical psychiatrist, it may be that Sam is on the spectrum and possibly lives with ADHD. He has suicidal thoughts and ideation, and is taking Ritalin to help focus his attention. And yet he shot someone, held up others at gunpoint, and clearly has terrifying anger issues. 

We are told, “People survive. Human beings go on. They have a capacity for love and a capacity for evil, but they go on.” It doesn’t ring true that contemporary Londoners would be that equable or forgiving, and the novel can’t decide between being a gritty police procedural and a charming endorsement of humanity.

Misfortune; Carelessness; and...: My Sister, The Serial Killer

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Atlantic Fiction

Pp. 226

The novella begins, “Ayoola summons me with these words – Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again.” Immediately we are in familiar but foreign territory. The structure is reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s, “Reader, I married him”, from Jane Eyre, but the shocking content is a lot less comforting. Originally published in Nigeria as an e-book entitled Thicker than Water, this tale of two sisters crosses genre lines from thriller to black comedy and socio-political commentary. As Richard Lea writes in their interview with the author (published at the end of the novel), “A novel that puts the relationship between two sisters at its heart, with men as supporting characters who may or may not make it to the final act, has been greeted as a riposte to crime fiction where the plot is so often set in motion by the gruesome death of young women.”

It clearly strikes a chord as it won the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/ Thriller, the 2020 British Book Award for Crime & Thriller Book of the Year, and it was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. As well as being critically praised, it is also popular with the public, and won the 2019 Amazon Publishing Reader’s Award for Best Debut Novel. It is certainly easy to read with short chapters (all with a one or two word title) and a fairly universal theme – we may not all have murderous siblings, but many of us understand sibling rivalry and family dynamics.

As the oldest, Korede is obliged to care for her younger sister, Ayoola, and now, she literally cleans up her sister’s messes. It doesn’t help Korede’s mental state to feel that her sister is outstandingly good-looking, and to constantly compare herself unfavourably. “The resemblance is there – we share the same mouth, the same eyes – but Ayoola looks like a Bratz doll and I resemble a voodoo figurine.”

Ayoola carries a knife on dates and she seems to have little compunction in disposing of her suitors, she claims in self-defence. Korede wants to believe her, but there is a touch of the Oscar Wilde loss of parents about her narrative; after all, she has killed three people; “Three, and they label you a serial killer”. Ayoola is seemingly remorseless and is back partying and posting on Instagram and Snapchat straight after she has killed her partner. She apparently believes that she is entirely innocent: “Her actions were the fault of her victims and she had acted as any reasonable gorgeous person would under the circumstances.” The implication is that she is excused because of her looks – it’s different if you’re beautiful.

When Ayoola shows interest in the doctor with whom Korede works, he of course reciprocates it, despite never having noticed Korede’s passionate feelings towards him. This might inform her questioning her sister’s version of events, at which Ayoola accuses her of victim shaming. “Victim? Is it mere coincidence that Ayoola has never had a mark on her, from any of these incidents with these men; not even a bruise?” At a time when we are struggling to believe women, this seems irresponsible, but education is not the duty of the author. Indeed, in her interview, Braithwaite contends, “I like to have fun. The books where I can tell I’m being taught something are a trial in the reading. If there’s a story and you learn something along the way; it’s a bonus.”

It transpires that the girls’ father subjected them to traditional and tribal cruelty, and Korede is concerned that Ayoola may have inherited some of this inherent brutality. “More and more, she reminds me of him. He could do a bad thing and behave like a model citizen right after. As though the bad thing had never happened. Is it in the blood? But his blood is my blood and my blood is hers.”

There are some things which may seem a little far-fetched for a genuine crime thriller – how could they possibly not get caught? One explanation is that the police force is highly corrupt, as are many other institutions in Nigeria, and they can be bribed to look away. Another consideration is that this is not meant to be forensically accurate. The page numbers are in a font that looks as though letters have been cut from newspaper print, or perhaps a graphic novel where all the information is condensed into one frame. It is currently being considered for film, which will be dramatic but not exactly realistic.

Oyinkan Braithwaite has provided us with a fast-paced, high-actioned, black-comedy crime thriller. It covers a lot of genres and is a terrific story. It seems churlish to expect more from her and we should be grateful for this offering and the knowledge that there are authors who can still deliver a gripping novel.

Dripping with Middle-class Snobbery: Rack, Ruin and Murder

Rack, Ruin and Murder by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 314

As cosy Cotswold murders go, this is a fine example. There’s a dilapidated old manor house, a family fallen on hard times, a local clan of ne’er do wells, and an unidentified dead body that turns up on someone’s sofa. Inspector Jess Carter has to scurry about the countryside splashing her car down narrow pot-holed roads and falling in drainage ditches to discover the identity of ‘the stiff’, as the corpse is generally called, and reporting back to Superintendent Ian Campbell, with whom she is bound to have a repressed romantic relationship – this is the second in a series that currently runs to six, so there’s plenty of time for this to develop.

With the help of the clueless Sergeant Morton, Carter rather fortuitously (and not entirely convincingly) uncovers the criminal elements of the tale. As in all families and small villages, there are buried secrets. Old Monty Bickerstaff (he of the erstwhile grand country house and biscuit emporium) has been keeping one for years. Now he is finding he can no longer cope without his daily whisky, memories of the past are starting to trouble him.

Later, when truths come to light, he remarks, “Secrets are buggers. The only place for them is out in the open where they can’t muck up anyone’s life.” This is clearly the homily of the novel, but without secrets there would be no murder mysteries, so they must remain, no matter what young Tansy Peterson argues. “They were all so bloody hypocritical in those days. They really were. They were dead set on respectability. That didn’t mean they behaved themselves, just that they buried any bad news, any scandal, as they saw it.” This allows for some clunky exposition as the Superintendent explains to young people today what things were like in olden times, and that it wasn’t easy to get a divorce, especially if you were a woman.

As with all death-by-numbers stories, there must be multiple characters, whom we can count as suspects, and they must all be described succinctly so that we can instantly form impressions. Granger’s portraits are one-dimensional and often snide; she is particularly prone to class and weight shaming, and clothes are often shorthand for character. Naturally, Jess is perfectly positioned as the manic-pixie-dream girl trope, “a terrier of a girl, with short dark-red hair, a pointed chin and widely spaced grey eyes that sparkled with intelligence.”

Other women are described by age, weight and perceived attractiveness, for example one is “pretty in a wan sort of way", while another is “an overweight blonde wearing tight black leggings that did nothing to disguise her plump thighs and bulging calves”. Older people get short shrift in the description stakes – they are largely past fanciable age and therefore barely relevant. It always reverts to age, such as three women who have been firmly and inescapably labelled: “The oldest woman was waving her arms above her head. The youngest, overweight, lumbered beside her, mouth gaping and badly dyed scarlet hair flying. Between the two extremes of age came a middle-aged third who must be Maggie Colley.”

Men don’t necessarily escape the class, weight and age censure either, and middle-class snobbery fairly drips off the pages with character outlines such as, “a burly, bearded man in grimy jeans and quilted body-warmer worn over a plaid shirt” or, “a short, podgy individual, wearing a ginger woolly cardigan, baggy brown corduroy trousers and slippers.”

This is a formulaic and relatively shallow murder mystery, with one-dimensional characters and a somewhat petty plot. But, it is heart-warming and life-affirming as the murder is neatly solved, and the charming Cotswold village can return being a peaceful idyll, until the next time, which we eagerly await!