Material Witness

REVIEW: A Killing in November by Simon Mason

And now for something completely different. Or rather someone completely different. Meet DI Ryan Wilkins, slouching onto the Oxford crime scene in ill-fitting tracksuit trousers, mistaken for a teenage offender with that scowl on his youthful face, and just about to put his anger management problems on display. 

"Chav. Poor white trash. Trailer-park ratboy." And this is just how Ryan Wilkins describes himself, to his new partner, DI Ray Wilkins. Yes, they're both called Wilkins. And just to add to the confusion, Ryan's infant son is also named Ryan. 

A Killing in November is the freshest, most original police procedural I've come across since the first time I read the late and much missed Susie Steiner's first Manon Bradshaw novel. And, not incidentally, Mason's first foray into Oxford is the best new crime series since Manon. It is that good. 

Inevitably, with its Oxford setting and its murder in the office of a College provost, comparisons will be made to Morse. Physically and temperamentally, and in their respective backgrounds, Morse and Ryan Wilkins could hardly be any different. Ray is closer to Morse, with his Balliol education and his classical music, while Ryan is more like the working class Lewis, albeit that he has none of Lewis's patience or measured approach to life and work. He is all sharp elbows, profanity and awkward aggression. He is in Oxford only because he left the Wiltshire force in disgrace after an incident with the Bishop of Salisbury. 

But there are shadows of Morse in Ryan's fierce cleverness, his forensic mind and his relentless pursuit of the truth whatever the personal and professional cost. 

And it all works rather brilliantly. The Oxford college setting is perfect for Ryan's first outing,  emphasising his otherness and setting him up in belligerent opposition to the forces of tradition and establishment. And like the great Colin Dexter, Mason brings Oxford alive, in all its Dreaming Towers glory and gloom. 

While the plot itself is interesting enough - a young woman is murdered in the Provost's office while the College is entertaining an Emirati dignitary it is hoping to extract cash from - it is Ryan's relationships with the other two Wilkins that nourish and sustain this book. 

With Ray, "he's a bit up himself", he is abrasive and rude and a most unwelcome intrusion into a life and career that is ordered and predictable. "Let me do the talking," Rays says repeatedly, worried about who Ryan is going to upset next. Of course, the warnings go unheeded. There's a marvelous tension between them throughout, 

And then with young Ryan, to whom he is single parent, he is only sensitivity and care. This is also a compelling, not to say touching, relationship.

A Killing in November is terrific. It's likely to win awards, and at some point, perhaps when Endeavour reaches the end of his road and something new is asked of Oxford, it will make great television. 

My only disappointment was that the sequel is not published until January. Roll on 2023. 

 

 

Summer recommendations 2022

With the temperature in most of Europe heading towards numbers that suggest beach rather than office, it feels like a good time to put the summer book bag together. Once again, this has been a pretty good year for new books, and also a good opportunity to revisit some classics. I have not included books here that I've reviewed this year, but of those I particularly recommend these three: Still Life by Sarah Winman; Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen and Judas 62 by Charles Cumming.   

Wherever you're going on holiday, all you really need to sunscreen, a few good books and a cold drink to your taste. Enjoy!

Bad Actors by Mick Herron

The Slough House crew probably found some new fans this year with the launch of Apple's excellent television adaptation (review). Meanwhile the peerless Mick Herron released the tenth novel in a series that shows no signs of running out steam. Bad Actors is a topical and timely addition in which the potential influence of Russia in Downing Street is at the heart of an intrigue that puts Jackson Lamb's crew of misfits back in the firing line. Herron is as funny as ever but it's the pointed critique of our current political situation mess that really makes this book fire. If you've not read any of Herron's novels before, start at the beginning with Slow Horses, and you in for a treat. His Zoe Boehm series is also worth a look. I am, as ever, looking forward to the next one.

 

On The Beach by Nevil Shute

A couple of weeks ago I spend a very pleasurable hour in Waterstones in Piccadilly looking through the fiction shelves for books with the red spine of Vintage Classics or the silver Penguin variety. I emerged with a good pile that included On The Beach, probably the best known novel of English writer Nevil Shute. This dystopian novel, written in 1957, is set in and around Melbourne (Shute spent his last years in Australia) as people in the southern hemisphere wait for the seemingly inevitable arrival of a radioactive cloud from a catastrophic nuclear war in the north. Forced to confront their mortality and choose how to live out their apparently final days, the book presents an intimate psychological study of its protagonists, who include an American submarine captain and an Australian naval officer and his wife. With war once again on the march through Europe, this felt like a timely novel. I thought it might be a little depressing, but it's actually rather beautiful and moving as Shute brings to life the humanity of characters who spend time thinking about what's really important to them. 

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

And that is also rather the theme of this marvellous and insightful novel by the very popular and Pulitzer Prize-winning Strout: what it means to be human and how we live our lives together in couples, families and communities. Olive herself is an irasicble seventh grade teacher who is the link between what are essentially 13 different stories told in the same book. Most of the activity takes places in a tough coastal town in Maine, where we are introduced to a variety of memorable characters trying to make their way. These include a young woman suffering from bulimia, a recently widowed woman who discovers her late husband had been having an affair and a hardware store owner falling out of love with his wife. As each of the stories is told, and tales of love and betrayal and loss and new beginnings are revealed, we begin to find a rounded portrait of Olive herself. Her own complications, peeled away like layers of an onion make her the perfect witness to the lives of her fellow townspeople. 

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I'm now just over half way through my quest to read all 15 of Dickens novels, and continue to be overwhelmed by the brilliance of the story-telling, the extraordinary characterisation and sheer ebullience of the writing.  Bleak House is wondrous in all regards. Here we have heroes and villains, lawyers and detectives, housewives and wards tied together in love, life and death by the seemingly endless probate case Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, which is being heard in the Chancery Court. There are love stories here, a detective story and polemics against poverty and the inquities of law. As ever with Dickens there is also great balance: for every nasty, scheming Tulkinghorn there is a kind, generous Allan Woodcourt; for every irresponsible Carstone there is a steady and dependable Esther Summerstone. It is long, richly detailed and quite magnificent. 

 

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths

Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway novels never disappoint. The Locked Room is the fourteenth book detailing the adventures of the North Norfolk archeology lecturer. This was the first novel I've read in which Covid played a prominent role and I was fascinated by the characters' experience of the onset of the pandemic: dismissal, followed by denial, then replaced by fear and then ultiamtely the boredom and frustration of lockdown. It reaffirmed what I've always suspected, which is that this was a rare shared human experience and many of us went through very similar mental processes adjusting to our new reality. Having everyone locked up of course could be problematic for mystery stories, but perhaos less so when archeology and its ancient history plays a role. In this case a discovery is linked to a rash of apparent suicide cases in women. Ruth, and her sometime lover, Chief Inspector Nelson investigate. Always enjoyable. 

 

Winter in Madrid by CJ Sansom

It's been years since I first picked up Sansom's novel of post Civil War Madrid, a spy story that revolves around British diplomatic efforts to keep Franco's Spain out of the Second World War. Although Madrid has changed somewhat since 1940, it was fascinating to revisit the novel after living in the City for the best part of a decade, and to understand better the history of such a dark and dangerous period. The mark of great historical fiction is that it can tell a story that marries fact and fiction while bringing a time and a place alive. Sansom - a master of this art, see his Shardlake novels - does just that here. Street names and sites are familiar but this is a Madrid charactersized by fear, suspicion and poverty. It's the perfect environment for a spy novel, and in Sansom's hands it is beautifully done.

 

Free Love by Tessa Hadley 

Tessa Hadley is surely one of the greatest writers currently working in English. Her style is understated, perhaps even quiet, but the story-telling is all the more powerful for the nuance with which she details the extraordinary lives that ordinary people in live. In this case it is the life of Phyllis Fischer who walks out of her suburban two-kids marriage to a civil servant to pursue an affair with a young writer. It is set in 1967/8 at the height of the sexual revolution and in unleashing chaos on her family and herself, Phyllis takes the reader into the middle of it. It is gripping, insightful and moving. 

 

 

 

Spain by Jan Morris

The longer I live here the more fascinated I am by Spain's culture, people and history, and this gem of a book added a huge amount amount of context to my understanding of the country. It was first published in 1964 and is more travel journey than history, written thematically rather than chronologically. So Morris' experience was mostly of a Spain emerging from the isolation imposed by fascism  and setting off on a path for the modern and vibrant country it is now. The version I read was republished after the death of the dictator and therefore questions about the past would impact the future became more urgent and important, and her insights are rewarding and thought-provoking and have survived the passage of time better than one might expect. Two things stuck with me after the book. The first is the exhilration of Morris's writing, which really captures the drama of the landscape and its people. And second was a factor I'd never really considered - that long before Spain was isolated from Europe by its politics, it had experienced centuries of isolation by dint of its geography. It's now one of Europe's most asccessible countries with fleets of aircraft bringing new visitors every day. But the great northern wall of the Pyrenees, combined with the oceans and the sparse interior for the longest time left it a country apart, and that had a huge impact on cultural and commercial development. A beautiful and enchanting portrait of a beautiful and enchanting country. 

REVIEW: Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

In late 2004 I was lucky enough to interview Carl Hiaasen, the satirist and Miami Herald columnist, for a Lunch with the FT. 

During the conversation I asked Hiaasen, who has published more than 20 novels set in what is described in this book as the "Florida nuthouse", why he hadn't written a novel about the 2000 US Presidential election that hinged on Florida and its hanging chads. 

"How could you improve on that? How could you come up with a cast of characters any more preposterous, or a scenario any more astounding than the one that took place? It's very hard," he replied. 

And yet a decade or so later, the United States elected a President so preposterous, to use Hiaasen's own word, that even a satirist as talented as he might have shied away from writing about him. But with Trump's Mar a Lago  property in West Palm Beach, the President dropped right into Hiaasen's territory, and I guess it was impossible to resist. 

Squeeze Me is everything you'd want in such a novel. It is fast, funny and absolutely brutal. The President is not named - only the Secret Service code name is used, 'Mastodon' - but there is little doubt about who is being lampooned. The President's girth, orange tan and hair are all sent up mercilessly, but more pertinently so are his politics. 

Squeeze Me starts with the disappearance of wealthy Palm Beach socialite Kiki Pew, a member of the Potussies, a group dedicated to supporting the President. The unfortunate Kiki turns out to have been swallowed whole by a giant Burmese python, but for various reasons both commercial and political this fact is never revealed. Instead the President is able to politicize her death by pinning it on a criminal plot involving Diego, a recently arrived illegal immigrant. 

With the authorities apparently unwilling and unable to run against this flow, it is left to Angie Armstrong, "wildlife wrangler extraordinaire", to clear the innocent Diego. Angie, who captures and kills the python in question, is a typical Hiaasen heroine. She is strong and indomitable, determined and profane and a lover and protector of Florida's ever-threatened natural habitat. 

Around her, Hiaasen builds his usual cast of the grotesque and colourful: criminals so moronic and debased they're only really a danger to themselves; greedy and reckless frat boys who never grew up; put-upon law enforcement officers; and many more. And then there is Mastodon, 'a soulless imbecile', and his First Lady, Mockingbird, who is having an affair with her protection officer. It's a three ring circus, hugely entertaining but alarming at the same time, because so much of it rings true. 

There is a vicious precision to Hiaasen's lampooning of the President and his hangers on. At times you can actually feel the glee with which he sticks the knife in and twists. And what makes it so much more powerful is that everything is believable. Hiaasen, a master of this type of work, knows there is no need for exaggeration here. 

For me this is his best and funniest novel since the 1980s and 1990s, when I was just blown away by the intensity of the writing and the sheer insantiy of plot and characters in novels like Double Whammy and Skin Tight.  A triumphant return to the very best form of one of the very best writers of the satirical novel.