Material Witness

REVIEW: The Quick by Laura Spinney

March 30

In her debut novel, The Doctor, Laura Spinney marked herself out as a thoughtful, subtle writer capable of performing one of the most challenging of the writer's arts: stripping the human soul right back to its very core and uncovering the secrets and emotions we all do our best to hide in public.

Her second novel, The Quick, is a very different story but what it has in common with The Doctor is an uncompromising approach to the human condition. At the heart of the story is a woman trapped both in a hospital bed and in her own unmoving shell. She is totally paralysed, but perhaps, her  doctors think, fully conscious, suffering from locked-in syndrome. But patient DL, tucked away in the remote corner of the top, almost forgotten floor of a London neurological hospital, is far from being the only character locked into a desperate condition.

The doctor that treats her, Sarah Newman, also the narrator of the tale, is an emotionally-repressed workaholic with no life outside her hospital. Patient DL's mother's life stalled on the day of her daughter's descent into immobile silence, while her blind father faces similar physical and emotional restraints. Her husband too, while following a somewhat mysterious course outside of DL's room, appears to have been all but crippled by his wife's condition.

All of which makes The Quick a difficult and often uncomfortable book to read. There is little warmth or emotion here to carry the reader through. The story is a reflection of the hospital itself: cold, drafty, austere and humourless.

But, save those occasions where Sid James is smoking under the sheets and Kenneth Williams conducting the ward rounds, hospitals are rarely joyous places, and there is an authenticity to the stark atmosphere and the crushing weight of helplessness and sadness felt by the visitors, and in this case, the medical staff.

And Spinney's refusal to dress her story in Sunday finery and cheer does her great credit. It is an honest and demanding novel, requiring a good deal of investment from its readers. It might have been easier, and perhaps more commercially-minded, to take the book down several other routes that open up during the narrative.

Patient DL's condition and story hold strong echoes of that of Terry Schiavo, a Florida woman who was diagnosed with a persistent and vegetative state after  collapsing with  repiratory and cardiac problems  in 1990. Last year her life achieved notoriety as the desperately sad battle between her parents, who believed she was conscious and wished her to live, and her husband who did not, was used as a political football by US politicians on both sides of the ideological divide who shamelessly pushed their narrow, dogmatic agendas through her desperate plight.

Patient DL's story touches on this political opportunism and cynicism, but shies away from it, instead concentrating on the  increasingly desperate search for life within her, analysing the line between dead and alive which seems to become finer and less-defined with every medical advance. 

Dr Newman, and her mentor, the enigmatic Mezzanotte, introduce a new and revolutionary tool to try to  uncover that life within patient DL and as they do The Quick becomes a race-against-time-near-thriller at the same time as it constructs a mirror in patient DL in which both the characters in the story and  the reader can find reflections of themselves.

The Quick is no summer-on-the-beach mass market page-turner, but those who enjoy being challenged and surprised by their novels should be grateful for that. It is subtle and surprising, prickly and uncompromising.  Give it a chance.

* One last word about The Quick. Fourth Estate, the publisher, have chosen to publish the book in paperback (what is known, I think as a "trade paperback") but for reasons best known to themselves have priced it, at £12.99, like a hardback.  Is it just me or this insane? Who the hell wants to pay a hardback price for a paperback, particularly for an unknown author? Mercifully, the great discounter in the ether, Amazon, have taken a sensible approach and priced the book at £7.79, which is a much more sensible and appealing tag.

Moral maze: the mystery of the missing shoes

March 29

Here’s my dilemma. A week or so ago our cleaner came into the office at about 5.30pm in the evening, as he does every day, and I noticed he was wearing a pair of Nike shoes that are exactly the same as a pair I own. 

I didn’t think anything of it until I saw him get in the lift later in the day wearing them again, and it got me wondering where my shoes were as I hadn’t seen them for a while. 

I ventured under my desk where I found three pairs of shoes, as well as all sorts of other unmentionable crap, but not the pair I was looking for. And that was what first made me suspicious, because I was pretty sure that was where they were. 

For a couple of days the whole shoe thing popped out of my head until I decided to have a look around at home for them. Again, plenty of shoes, but no brown/grey Nike loafer types. 

Now I’m very suspicious. There are really only a couple of explanations for my shoes going missing. 

1 – I’ve left them on a train or mislaid them somewhere else. This is entirely possible. I’m not great at keeping track of my stuff, and have left quite a bit of it on trains, notably a dozen langoustines and two sea bass fillets. 

2 – Someone’s taken them. Also possible. But shoes are an odd thing to nick, aren’t they? I’m not sure I’d be happy wearing someone else’s. But then again, these were in relatively good condition, not worn too often. 

2a – The cleaner’s taken them. I’ve read too much crime fiction to remain a believer in coincidence. I have only ever seen one other person wearing these particular trainers in the 14 months I’ve had them. 

Now, I don’t care much about the shoes. They were an impulse comfort purchase bought in desperation after I almost crippled my feet walking around the several million square feet of the Las Vegas Convention Centre in a pair of RM Williams boots. They were comfortable but they didn’t really suit me (too trendy, I think), and I’m not sure how long I would have kept them. 

And despite the fact that the guy may have stolen a pair of shoes from me, I don’t really want to get him in trouble. Anyone who needs to steal shoes probably needs his job quite a bit, and doubtless needs the shoes more than I do. The fact that he wears them in here every so often could also mean that he has nothing to hide and they are not my shoes at all. That or the fact that he’s not very bright. 

But that said, I don’t want him in the office. I keep my iPod, laptop and other sundry valuables about the place (as do my colleagues) and he’s here at night when the place is empty and the pickings relatively easy. 

My problem is one of lack of proof, and lack of ideas about how to proceed.

Unfortunately, since I left junior school my Mum no longer writes my name in my shoes, so there would be no evidence that the shoes are mine.
So all things considered, I’m at a bit of a loss to know what to do about it. 

The options seem to be:

1 – Challenge him outright

2 – Make a joke about what great shoes he’s wearing and tell him I have pair the same!

3 – Make a complaint (with zero evidence) to his company.

Termperamentally, I guess I'm probably pre-programmed not to do anything at all, and hope that the problem goes away. But I realise doing nothing is not one of my options. So help me out here: what would you do? Comments gratefully received below.

 

 

REVIEW: The Woods by Harlan Coben

March 26

If I was running a course for aspirant thriller writers on how to construct a plot for a novel, I'd probably just hand out copies of a couple of Harlan Coben books and tell the students to come back when they'd finished.

Coben starts with a single, simple and utterly compelling premise: how do (relatively) ordinary people react when subjected to extraordinary circumstances or an extreme event?  From this point he draws components from a tried and trusted formula which are applied to each plot: the subject is (usually) a decent  person trying to live a good and quiet life in the suburbs of New Jersey;  the subject invariably harbours a secret or secrets that are gradually revealed as the novel progresses; the subject is often propelled into a search for something precious that is lost; finally, the subject becomes the hunted and is placed in mortal danger by this quest.

Coben's signature is the way in which the novel first grabs the reader by the throat within the opening pages by pitching the subject into chaos and confusion and then, by turns, relaxes or tightens the grip, a keeping the reader on life support throughout before throttling them with the ending.

It works better in some of his novels than others. Tell No One, Coben's first standalone, is a modern masterpiece.  The four standalones that followed were merely terrific page-turners. The Woods is probably the best since Tell No One.

It starts with ambitious  NJ county prosecutor Paul Copeland being hauled out of his daughter's gym display by a couple of cops who need to speak to him about a homicide victim who dies with Copeland's name and address on his person. As soon as "Cope" sees the victim he is plunged backwards in time to his darkest hour: the night his sister and another boy disappeared in the woods never to be seen again, and another teenage couple were brutaly murdered.

Elsewhere a former girlfriend of Copeland's begins to hear her own echoes of that night as her secrets also begin to come uncomfortably close to the surface.

In parallel to the disturbing reemergence of that night , Copeland must  also cope with his ongoing trial of two frat boys, scions of rich and powerful families, for the rape of a poor black teenager.

There are a great many strands drawn together in The Woods, including dangerous territory such as Cold War espionage, the politics of race and money and questions of loyalty to family and ethical standards.

Coben, the great practitioner of the dark arts of mystery writing, is in spell-binding form, handing over morsels of insight and information in the manner of a parsimonious workhouse cook who leaves everyone shouting for more.

He judges his pace to perfection and gradually reveals all as the book races to a thrilling climax.

The Woods is published in the UK on May 16, in the US on April 17. Harlan Coben's website contains some footage of him talking about the book.

Ne Le Dis A Personne

Fans of Harlan Coben will doubtless also be interested to hear that the French made movie adaptation of Tell No One - Ne Le Dis a Personne - will be released in the UK in June, and made its US debut this month.

The film has had a successful release in France, where it won several Cesars (the French equivalent of the Oscars.

Bob Woolmer; cricket, murder and mystery

March 22

I have resisted the temptation to follow closely the speculation rumours drifting out of Jamaican police HQ over the past few days about what exaclty killed Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer last Sunday morning.

By last night, however, the level of details in a lot of the unconfirmed reports was such that it appeared highly likely that Woolmer was the victim of murder.

And so it has proved, with the police reporting late last night that Woolmer was strangled the morning after his team lost to rank outsider Ireland and were eliminated from the Cricket World Cup. BBC report.

Before we move on to the natural next question - why? - it is worth reflecting on this extraordinary situation for a moment. A professional cricket coach, several thousand miles away from home has been murdered in his hotel room. It's beyond strange. It's one the most shocking events I can recall in sport, and you have to believe the likelihood is that it is a sports-related matter.

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I'm very disappointed with that attitude.  I can assure you it is much, much more important than that," the late Bill Shankly, revered manager of Liverpool Football Club famously said. But it's bollocks of course. Football, like cricket, is a game, a sport.

But in recent years a great many new elements have begun to surround cricket - vast quantities of money, betting, drugs, political interference, nationalism - that have intensified the importance of key games and decisions and given them implications that resonate beyond a mere sporting context.

Pakistan has all these writ large. In Pakistan cricket has been heavily politicised and factionalised. It has had match fixing and betting allegations. Allegations of cheating; players punching supporters, players banned for taking steroids. And a team that has underperformed its potential. ANd back at home there is a rabid, cricket-loving populace waiting to deify/satanise the players and officials and politicians wanting their say and their pound of flesh.

And so when Bob Woolmer was found dead on Sunday morning, the reaction of many (myself included) will have been: I wonder if it was foul play.

And so it was. But why? Speculation now appears to favour an old cricketing favourite: match-fixing. Or perhaps that Woolmer was attacked by a fan angry at Pakistan's pathetic cricketing capitulation. Both seem somewhat unlikely. But whatever the motive it's going to sound unlikely. There's a long way for this sad saga to run.

A rich fictional seam

Before confirmation that Woolmer was murdered had been delivered I commented to Mrs H when I got home from work last night that it was beginning to look that way, and she responded: "That could be your book. Combining sport with mystery and crime."

Suprisingly a little research this morning revealed a fair few fictional cricketing mysteries, including one by Ted Dexter, the former England captain. There's a good list here.

The sad death of Bob Woolmer; Jane Austen on ITV - Billie Piper all wrong; Introducing Marcus Barr

March 19

Professional sport - it's no longer a game

I sat up until late on Saturday night, watching one of the most extraordinary results in world cricket unfold as the unheralded amateurs of Ireland beat the renowned professionals of Pakistan in a thrilling tense World Cup match.

As Ireland won, and I celebrated, Sky Sport's coverage dwelt on the figure of Bob Woolmer, Pakistan's coach, sitting on his team's balcony shaking his head. And at the time I thought to myself, "this guy does not deserve this". His players got all they had coming; they really didn't look like their hearts were in it, and played with exactly the lack of fire and discipline that Woolmer had worked so hard to restore to their game.

It is pointless speculating at this stage about what killed Bob Woolmer, who was found unconscious in his hotel room in the morning following the game and died shortly after in hospital in Jamaica.

But what his sad death illustrates is just how much pressure there is in modern professional sport. Week after week we see managers, coaches and players pushed to emotional and stressful extremes. So much rides on so little. In Pakistan, the defeat to Ireland would likely have led to a huge national outcry, probably even the team returning home in disgrace. Every weekend we see other matches where careers and/or millions of dollars depend on the outcome of one moment or decision.

It's an increasingly tough world, and I suspect we will see more and more victims of the pressure who are unable to deal with the high stakes and expectations.

ITV's Jane Austen season

The Sunday night crime slot has given way to something altogether more gentle, a three film Jane Austen season, which started last night with Mansfield Park.

Now personally, I prefer the crime,  but a change is as good as a holiday, and Mansfield Park was a pretty good alternative. The production values were high, the settings beautiful, the screenplay strong and the acting largely excellent. I particularly liked Joseph Beattie as a suitably rakish Henry Crawford and Jemma Redgrave as Mrs Bertram.

But what about Billie Piper? Now although I don't find her particularly attractive, usually I have a lot of time for Billie now she's given up her teenage popdom and I liked her a lot in  The Ruby in the Smoke, but I'm afraid this just didn't feel right.  Not Austenesque enough, even if she was playing the outsider.

Nonetheless, quality drama is always very welcome, and ITV has upped its game considerably this year.

Next week, Northanger Abbey.

Haggard Hawk, coming tomorrow

It could be that crime has disappeared from Sunday nights because one of its leading writers is taking a busman's holiday and writing novels instead of scripts.

Marcus Barr, whose credits include Midsomer Murders under a different name, sees his first novel Haggard Hawk released in paperback tomorrow. The novel features retired detective Nathan Hawk, now living in what the book describes as "village England" (a place familiar to Midsomer Murders viewers I suspect, and those of Lovejoy, which Mr Barr has also worked on) and investigating a brutal murder that takes place on the road outside his village.

The first 30 pages are promising indeed. Good characters, very fluid writing and a rigorous pace.

Review coming soon.  There are copies available in a competition on the excellent Eurocrime.

Save the battlefield! Gettysburg at risk

March 15

A little over 10 miles from my home, lying in unremarkable but pretty Northamptonshire farming country, is Naseby, site of the decisive battle of the English Civil War.

Fought in 1645, the Battle of Naseby effectively ended the four year old Civil War and consequently the country's status as a monarchy. By any judgement, it is an important historical site, arguably the most important battlefield on British soil (given that the Battle of Britain was fought in the air).

You'd never know it if you visited. There are two monuments in and around Naseby (one of which is included above), both largely overgrown with weeds and moss and neither offering anything in the way of useful information about the battle. Although the site itself apparently remains largely as it was in the seventeenth century, the area has been blighted by the construction in the recent past of the A14, a four lane highway running from the east coast to the Midlands. A campaign has begun to improve facilities at the site, and is enjoying some success, but there's a long way to go as anybody who has visited Gettysburg or Antietam or other US Civil War battlefields will know.

These sites are magnificent historical parks, lovingly and meticulously preserved to honour the memories of those who fought there and thoughtfully augmented with museums and other visitor sites and information aimed at educating those who visit and servicing their needs.

I had the good fortune to visit both in September 2004, and was completely mesmerised by them and how easy it was to walk through the progress of the battles and understand exactly how each unfolded and, more than that, their significance in the grander scheme.

But what each also had in their favour was an unspoiled aspect, sitting quietly in farming country (not unlike Naseby) and largely unmolested by development.

But that could be about to change, as this report in USA Today, kindy sent me by a reader who knows my interest in the US Civil War, outlines.

Not only would this be a grand shame, it would be almost criminal to infect these marvellous sites with the cancerous creep of development. And it's utterly unnecessary. There is absolutely no shortage of room in that corner of the US to develop elsewhere. I can understand why people would want to build houses in Gettysburg. It's a beautiful area. But it's equally beautiful 15km up the road towards Hanover or Taneytown or in pretty much any direction and build wonderful communities without soiling an important national monument.

   

Finding Laura Spinney; Falling Fallen Angel

March 14

Useless book stores

A week ago a friend of mine, Laura Spinney, published her second novel The Quick, a tale with echoes of the nasty Terry Schiavo case of last year which produced the ugly spectacle of US lawmakers fell all over themselves  to make political capital out of her desperately sad situation.

I bought a copy from Amazon a couple of weeks ago to try and get an early review up here to help Laura's cause, but my wife snagged the book and started reading it. Unfortunately Mrs H doesn't have a massive amount of time for reading and doesn't read very quickly when she does, so I have not yet got my copy back and might not for a couple of weeks.

So while out and about today I decided to get a second copy. I went into both Books Etc at Farringdon and Waterstones on Oxford Street - a pretty big store - but neither was selling copies. I appreciate that Laura isn't (yet) Kate Atkinson or Anne Tyler or (God forbid) Dan Brown, but equally she never will be if major chains don't pick up on novelists being promoted by major publishers (in this case 4th Estate) as a "major new talent".  (Although they probably say that about all their new authors, or if they don't, they probably should).

I have only vaguely followed the debate surrounding whether chainstores and discounting of books are killing off  independent stores and threatening the volume and diversity  of the publication of new authors. But this depressing litlle episode kind of brought home to me the fact that this a desperately difficult market to crack into.

I'm going to have one last go this evening. Perhaps at the giant Waterstones at Trafalgar Square, but after that I guess it's back to Amazon, which for all its faults does have a pretty comprehensive inventory.

Once I've finally got this book I'll come back and review.

Reverse engineering damages Fallen Angel?

People like their television and their books to run in a certain order. Start, middle, end. That sort of thing. The fact that Fallen Angel, whose conclusion was broadcast on ITV last night, did not run in that order (Sunday night's show included the conclusion, last night's took the viewer back to the beginning) was partly what made it so interesting.

But Media Guardian (a site that requires registration, sorry) reports that viewing figures fell from 6.7m on Sunday (pretty good for this sort of thing) through 6m on Monday night down to 4.8m.

Now that might be because the middle episode was rubbish; or because the final episode coincided with Life on Mars (5.1m), which was probably competing for much the same audience. Or it could be that having already been told how the whole 4.5 hour saga ended, diminishing numbers of people were willing to invest the time in discovering how it had started.

At least some of those have been here today trying to find out how it ended, judging by some of the search terms some visitors have used to get here. I'm afraid I can't help as I Sky Plused episodes two and three and probably won't get around to watching them before the weekend, if ever.

But anyone desperate to find out should probably get the novel, Requiem for an Angel, written by Andrew Taylor, who was also responsible for the excellent The American Boy.

British Book Awards; Fallen Angel and John Connolly's fairy tales

March 12

Vote early and often

I hadn't heard of the Galaxy British Book Awards, until an e-mail arrived over the weekend pointing out that readers can vote for various awards. The one that really interested me, obviously, was Crime Thriller of the Year, which has a four book shortlist:

Looking Good Dead by Peter James
The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin
One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne

The fact that Kate Atkinson appears on this list tells me I should be paying more attention, I had no idea she had written one crime novel, never mind two (this apparently is the second Jackson Brodie mystery). If I ever get past the ever-growing stack on my to read list, I'll give it a go.

The Sam Bourne book I have seen advertised about the place, but as it looked to me like the spawn of Da Vinci I have given it a wide berth, which is a great pity because there's been the most wonderful literary hoo ha about the whole thing. Apparently Sam Bourne is actually Jonathan Freedland, high-powered Guardian political commentator. The Guardian commissioned Michael Dibdin, creator of Italian detective Aurelio Zen, to review the book, but pulled it when the novel was comprehensively trashed by Dibdin.

Piqued, Dibdin sent his review to The Times instead, which gleefully published here. There's a book that will not go on to the review list. It sounds absolutely ridiculous.

My choice therefore boils down to Rankin and James. I liked The Naming of the Dead a great deal, as you can tell from this review,  but I liked Looking Good Dead more.  There's a real freshness to James' writing and to Roy Grace, his detective, that promises a great deal. And so I placed my vote there.

Fallen Angel

Regular devotees of ITV's Sunday night 9pm crime slot will have gotten something of a shock last night as Fallen Angel slipped into shoes recently vacated by Barnaby and Lewis. These latter are gentle types both and their detection is interspersed with moments of levity, humour and (in the case of Barnaby) high farce.

None of that with the Fallen Angel which was 90 unforgiving minutes of television mixing a potent cocktail of family secrets, the suggestion of paedophilia, child abduction, religion, mental health problems and a fair bit of gore.  No laughing matter there.

It wasn't the greatest piece of television mystery I have ever seen, but it was compelling in that motorway-rubbernecking sort of way, and clever in its promise of working backwards from the final crime towards an explanation of the making of a murderer.

It continues tonight.

John Connolly's dark places

I've been a big John Connolly fan since the arrival of the first Charlie Parker mystery in 1999. Connolly has always managed to mix seamlessly hard-boiled detective fiction with a hint of the supernatural, and in particular the elemental battle between good and (satanic) evil. This trend reached a superlative peak in Dark Angel.

His most recent work, The Book of Lost Things, which I'm scorching through at the moment, is a diversion if not a departure. It is a high speed spin through the anxieties and compleixities of childhood, which heartily shakes down the thin membrane that separates fantasy from reality in young minds.

It follows the story of a boy in wartime London who loses his mother to cancer and is then moved unwillingly into a stepchild scenario. Fighting against his new circumstances the boy David retreats into his books, including several dark fairy tales, eventually falling into their world where he becomes locked in a life or death struggle with various fantastical characters while at the same time adjusting his expectations of and views on the real world.

It's fascinating stuff, unconventional but lovingly written, almost a paean to childhood fantasy and literature and its wondrous ability to bring children out of themselves and harness their unlimited creative potential. Connolly is lucky that the march towards responsibility and adulthood has driven so little of his out of him.

   

Lewis and Hathaway; Dan Brown on Harlan Coben; Ian Rankin and the Knots and Crosses Anniversary

March 8

It's all about the sidekick...

All good partnerships take time to settle down, and so it is with Inspector Lewis and sidekick Detective Sergeant Hathaway, who first series ended on Sunday.

It took a little while for me to get into this three-part series, which follows a pilot broadcast last year, but having drifted in and out of the first episode, the following pair have me hooked.

And ultimately it all boils down to Hathaway. Lewis is a much-loved television character, and there is a great deal to commend him. Over the years with Morse he changed from being dependable but dull-witted foil to Morse to being an integral, increasingly powerful and influential element of the partnership. But his virtues of reliability, loyalty and steadiness - "I like to live safely," he tells an old flame during Sunday's episode - are not those  of a character that can  carry a series.

And that's whether Hathaway comes in: brilliant, diffident, a little bit cheeky, compassionate, somewhat rebellious (he smokes! on tv!). Hathaway is played with aplomb by Laurence Fox, who brings every ounce of his acting blue blood to bear on this Cambridge-educated, one-time theologist character.

And the chemistry with the always excellent Kevin Whateley is terrific. The two play off each other extremely well and are well on the way to replicating the impact that the relatiosnhip between Morse and Lewis had. This is somewhat different. There is a lot less cantankerous yelling, a lot less condescension and a little more partnership, particularly at this early stage.

And they've made themselves a feature of recent Sunday nights and will be much missed now the series is finished. But another is promised for next year.

Dan Brown's best ever sentence

On the cover of the uncorrected proof of Harlan Coben's next novel, The Woods, is a recommendation from none other than Dan Brown, writer of the truly appalling Da Vinci Code and other very bad novels.

"Harlan Coben is the modern master of the hook-and-twist," it says.

And there in 11 words, Dan Brown has just about said it all. It's so pithy and well-written in fact, I wonder if I need to reconsider my opinion of Brown. Fat chance.

But no need to reconsider my opinion of Coben, who is perhaps the most skilled mystery storyteller of his generation. I've just finished The Woods, review coming shortly, and it's his best since Tell No One.

Ian Rankin's 20th anniversary of Rebus

Through the post this morning, along with Laura Lippman's latest Little Sister, comes a collectors' edition of Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus novel, published originally in 1987.

I expect Orion to market this natty little edition reasonably hard, which means Rankin should be around quite a bit in the coming weeks and perhaps talking a little more about his plans for a post-Rebus life.