Tag Archives: Crime

Book review

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels is Hallett’s third (substantial) novel to be published in the last two years, following 2021’s The Appeal, and 2022’s The Twyford Code. A fourth novel is already in the works. She is a busy writer!

The distinctive feature of all three novels is their format – they are modern versions of epistolary novels in which the narrative is told not by a narrator but through texts, WhatsApp messages, diary notes and in the case of Alperton a host of other primary sources, including extracts from a screenplay and two novels. This can make the narrative quite fragmented – there is no guiding consciousness to explain what is going on, the reader has to do a lot more of the work – but it is refreshingly different, and allows multiple voices and perspectives to be heard, as well as telling the story in lots of different ways. Together they tell the contemporary story of the eponymous Alperton Angels, a millennial cult that ended in a bloodbath eighteen years earlier. A baby that survived the killings is due to come of age, and Amanda Bailey, a crime writer, is commissioned to write a book about the case. The book is part of a crime series re-examining previous murders, and there are lots of references to real-life cases (Fred West etc). Her editor impresses on her that the key to making the book a success is finding and interviewing the rescued baby. And so it begins.

It quickly becomes apparent that there is more to the ‘mysterious case’ than originally appears. Some basic information about the three – or is it four? – deaths is missing. What appears to be a very well known and researched case melts away on closer examination, and none of the key witnesses can be found or are willing to talk. Alarmingly people Amanda tries to interview start to die off in unexplained circumstances. A fellow crime writer, Oliver Menzies, is also working on the story, and when their investigations overlap their publishers suggest they work together, trying to find fresh perspectives on the case. The novel’s approach to narration means information is slowly eked out and there’s limited reflection by the characters. Amanda’s transcription assistant, Ellie, provides a useful sounding board for her to bounce ideas off, but her relationship with Oliver is constrained by more than professional competitiveness – they have a history dating back to when they first entered the profession.

I had some reservations about Hallett’s earlier novels – yes, they were satisfyingly easy reads in which the pages kept turning quite briskly, but the mystery elements of the stories simply weren’t strong enough. The outcome of the various puzzles often depended on people behaving irrationally and sometimes just didn’t add up. With this novel at first it looked as if using a crime where irrational behaviour was a fundamental part of the case might have resolved some of these issues – if ever a participant did something unbelievable or bizarre it could be written off as symptomatic of the power of the cult. And Amanda seems very professional in her approach to her investigation – she has a sensible and very systematic working pattern which is set out clearly for the reader. She also has extensive contacts in the crime world (police and social services in particular) and is prepared to bend a few rules in the interests of getting the story. Oliver on the other hand is less impressive and acts as a drag on the investigation.

But suspension of disbelief can only get you so far. And so will being spoiler-free. So from this point in this review expect spoilers and stop reading if you haven’t yet read The Mysterious Case and intend to do so.

Firstly, I wasn’t convinced at all that Oliver would become a believer in the arrival on earth of the antichrist on the basis of a fifteen minute interview with the charismatic cult-leader, who we are told is just a common everyday kidnapper. Amanda impersonates a friendly spiritual adviser who leads Oliver further down the path but it’s still a long way before you decide to kill a minor royal on the off-chance they are the daughter of Satan. This was just one of many comically implausible features of the plot. Amanda’s decision to rush down to try and stop him (rather than say just phoning the police) made no sense at all. And while her investigation is presented as being very thorough there are some sources she ignores – the autopsies of the bodies or the transcripts of the trial proceedings for example, where the number of victims would be easily resolved and original witness evidence would be recorded. We are also invited to believe that not only would the police beat to death a suspect who had been seen walking through the front door of the local police station that evening, but they would then opportunistically add the body to the cult suicide crime scene (which incidentally wasn’t a cult crime scene at all, but the assassination of some underworld kidnappers) as a convenient way of disposing of it. That just makes no sense whatsoever – a beaten body looks very different from someone shot and ritualistically disfigured. And if that wasn’t unbelievable enough we are invited to believe that this was all witnessed by an American crime writer, over in the UK for research, who is allowed to watch the body being dumped and arranged at the crime scene and then just waved on his way back to the USA, never to mention what he saw again, despite it being the kind of thing a crime writer might actually, you know, write about. This is all just plain nonsense. Crime novels can have some improbabilities, granted, the untraceable poisons and so on, but this was way too much to ask.

Which is so disappointing, because the central idea here – revisiting a historic crime investigation, finding a new perspective and working out what has happened to the survivors – is great. And there have been suicide cults in the recent past that were led by charismatic charlatans. So the premise could have worked, and the narrative structure could have papered over some of the cracks and improbabilities. But never to this extent, at least not for me. Such a waste.

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, Janice Hallett, 2023

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Book review

The Twyford Code is several books at once. Don’t be misled by the Osmanesque branding – this is nothing like The Thursday Murder Club, apart from coexisting in the broad category of mystery/crime. The misleading marketing continues in the novel’s blurb, which claims “It’s time to solve the murder of the century...” even though the novel isn’t about a murder. What it is about is slightly harder, I’d admit, to define.

It opens with what seems at first to be a fairly clumsy framing device – a detective inspector sends some transcribed audio-files to an academic who specialises in cryptic codes, asking for assistance in tracing the missing person who made the recordings. That’s where the first warning signal should been buzzing away – why send the transcriptions rather than the audio files themselves? And why transcribe the files using a very poor voice recognition software full of mistakes when an audio typist could have transcribed the audio accurately? Of course there are answers to both these questions that we find out at the end of the novel when the big reveal takes place, although by then we have just accepted the premise.

The transcribed recordings form the bulk of the narrative. Some are straightforward dictation, others are recordings of telephone conversations, and a few are fragmented recording of conversations while the phone is in the character’s pocket, constituting in effect ‘overheard’ conversations. This gives the novel the immediacy of a story being told in the moment, although the device doesn’t always work. There are several points when the narrative has some catching up to do. The recordings are being made by Steven Smith, who has recently been released from a long prison sentence, and are directed to his parole officer, Maxine. They are an account of his life story, focussing on an incident from his schooldays. Travelling on a bus he found a copy of a children’s book. Thinking he might be able to sell it for the price of a bag of chips he took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, (throughout the novel her name is transcribed as ‘missiles’, which at first was mildly amusing but which quickly became irritating), who is fascinated by it. Eventually she explained to Steven her belief that the author was using the bland children’s stories to communicate in code, To whom, and about what, is unclear, but in pursuit of the mystery she organised a field trip for her class to the author’s family home in Bournemouth. At some point during the trip she disappeared, leaving her class to make their own way home.

Steven has become obsessed by this buried memory, and now free to pursue his investigation he contacts the schoolmates who were with him on the trip. Alongside the story of his investigation he recounts memories of his childhood and how he drifted into a life of crime.

Twyford is a very thinly disguised version of Enid Blyton. There is some clumsy commentary on how Blyton was cancelled in the seventies and eighties, which is very much not the case and glosses over the fact that there was problematic content in her stories. It wasn’t political correctness that caused Blyton to fall out of fashion but an increasing awareness that the outdated views on gender and race in her stories was potentially harmful to kids. But she was never banned and her books remained widely available and in print.

The mystery at the core of The Twyford Code is hard to pin down – the focus of the mystery keeps shifting. It’s not clear whether Miss Isles did go missing on the day trip to Bournemouth, nor whether the Twyford books do contain acrostics and other codes pointing to the whereabouts of stolen bullion hidden during the second world war. It’s also unclear whether the narrator is being pursued by mysterious figures throughout his investigations, as he appears to be, or whether these are figures of his imagination. He is an unreliable narrator and there’s almost nothing he says that can be trusted.

The resolution to the novel is well constructed and convincing, but it is a long time coming. You can read mystery/crime novels passively, knowing that each mystery you are presented with will be explained and resolved fairly quickly, or you can more actively engaged with the text and try and work out what is going on. This novel pushes that choice upon the reader quite hard – for example we are presented with large chunks of text from the Twyford stories and asked to decode them. I have no idea whether this is a confession or not, but I tend to read these popular fiction novels for entertainment rather than mental exercises, and I don’t try to work the puzzles out. I know that the author will usually have withheld key information making the working out element almost impossible, and Hallett is no exception. As an example, we are told that acrostics can be found throughout the Twyford stories between occurrences of the word ‘cat’. This is then modified to phrases where the word ‘cat’ appears as an acrostic itself, and then further modified to phrases where the word ‘cat’ appears close together in the text. Then it is finally revealed (minor spoiler) that cat isn’t the real keyword at all, and there is another keyword which we should have been looking out for all the time. That’s just cheating isn’t it? If the intention was to invite the read to go back over these passages and work out the puzzles than that’s a hard pass from me.

There are other instances where the puzzles in the text are impossible for the reader to decrypt. A picture in the background of a photograph is believed to contain clues relating to numbers of a dartboard. Subsequently a different version of the picture is revealed showing another set of numbers. So any effort invested in trying to discern the relevance of the first group of numbers – are the map references, dates, codes to a cypher etc – is pointless. That’s my excuse for not engaging with this element of the novel – it’s a matter of personal choice and if you enjoy trying to work these puzzles out then go for it.

I appreciate the fact that the author tried something different here rather than the conventional, narrator-led body in the drawing room school of cosy crime. She also includes some commentary in education in prison, and the treatment of children with special educational needs, all of which is very commendable. I am tempted to try Hallett’s earlier novel The Appeal which has received positive reviews, and to which by all accounts this represents a slightly disappointing follow up. Without wanting to sound too condescending, if you are looking for something diverting on a long train journey, this might fit the bill, but I doubt it will linger long in the memory.

The Twyford Code, Janice Hallett, 2022

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Book review

The Thin Man was Hammett’s last published novel, appearing initially in a magazine in 1934, although he went on to live until 1961. Hammett was a left-wing writer during a period of America’s history where this was very much going against the political grain, eventually finding himself blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House of UnAmerican Activities. Earlier he had gone to prison rather than reveal the names of contributors to a fund he set up to support eleven men appealing their convictions for “criminal conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the Government by force and violence.” It is fair to assume that it was these experiences which put him off novel writing, although of course he continued writing in other formats.

Hammett is widely credited with creating a new form of detective novel, the ‘hard-boiled detective’ genre. This was a world apart from the refined novels of writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, Raymond Chandler famously summarised the distinctive element of Hammett’s novels: that he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley“. The Thin Man is a fine example of this genre.  

Anyone reading the novel without being aware of the setting will be shocked to find out that the story is set in December 1932 – that is to say in the last days of Prohibition. Given that it remained technically illegal to drink alcohol in the USA, Nick Charles, the novel’s principal character, drinks relentlessly, asking for alcohol at every opportunity like a man dying of thirst. Nick is a former private detective, having retired early following marriage to a wealthy socialite, and is visiting New York with his much younger wife, Nora, to celebrate Christmas and the New Year (and presumably the impending demise of Prohibition). He is reluctantly drawn into investigating a complex murder. A scientist, the titular thin man, has gone missing, and his assistant and former girlfriend is found dead by his ex-wife, on whom suspicion inevitably falls. Their children also act suspiciously and are candidates for the crime, but the police’s focus is on the missing scientist, Clyde Wynant. Together with the local police Nick and Nora drink heavily and talk smart as they try to crack the case.

The focus on drinking throughout the novel is relentless and eventually quite funny:

 ‘“How do you feel?”

“Terrible. I must’ve gone to bed sober.”’

……….

‘“Don’t you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?”

“No, thanks.”

“Maybe it would if I took one?”

…….

‘“Why don’t you stay sober today?

We didn’t come to New York to stay sober.”’

The dialogue is the whip-smart wise-cracking we have come to expect from private detectives and their glamourous assistants, but which Hammett seems to have invented:

“She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

Nick in particular has a great line in sarcasm, particularly when he is teasing his wife, who to be fair gives him as good as he gets:

“I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine.”

I shook my head. “At breakfast.” “But it’s Christmas now.” “Breakfast.”

“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”

“You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the…”

……………

“Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: “What are you holding out on me?”

“Oh, dear,” I said, ” I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the…”

The novel is fast-paced – Nick and Nora rarely seem to sleep, and think nothing of setting off at midnight to yet another party. The novel’s resolution seems a little hurried, with everything wrapped up in a few pages once the partying runs out of steam. The novel was very successful and spawned a film, a sequel, and a long-running television series. On its own merits the novel is enjoyable but slight – the reader’s enjoyment is mainly derived from the humour and the wide range of criminal characters, but the plot is almost an after-thought. The same could be said of many of Raymond Chandler’s novels, of course. Hammett was without doubt a profound influence on Chandler, and his style and technique can be found on almost every page of the latter’s work. At the same time I would argue (and I don’t think this is contentious) that Chandler evolved the genre to another level. The principal differences between the two are the latter’s extraordinary turn of phrase (“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”). Marlowe is also a much harder, more violent man than Nick, and the overall body-count in novels such as The Big Sleep is much higher. While Nick can shrug off a bullet wound with a light bandage and another slug of whisky, when Marlowe is beaten up we feel every blow.

P.S. I’ve written more here about the differences between Marlowe and Sam Spade, Hammett’s main character in novels such as the classic The Maltese Falcon.

The Thin Man, by Dashiel Hammett, 1934

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Book review

Call for the Dead by John le Carre, 1961

Call for the Dead is the first novel in which George Smiley appears, which of course is the right order in which to read a novel series, not jumping straight in with the last one as I carelessly did recently. Carre

The novel opens with the suicide of civil servant Samuel Fennan following a routine security check, which in turn had been prompted by an anonymous accusation that Fennan had been leaking secrets to/working for the Russians. This is the novel’s central puzzle – why would Fennan kill himself when the review was going to clear him? But kill himself he has, and it begins to look as if the investigating officer, one George Smiley, is going to be blamed for his death.

This is the first of the novel’s many improbabilities – despite it being obvious that there is at least a chance that Smiley is going to be implicated in the suicide, he is asked to investigate it. He interviews Fennan’s wife Elsa in her home. While there he answers the telephone, expecting the call to be for him, (oh for the days before mobiles!) but it is an alarm call from the telephone exchange which Fennan had booked the night before. Why would someone book a call and then kill themselves? Could it possibly be that this is not a suicide, but a murder staged to look like one? It could.

A local policeman Inspector Mendel, the classic copper only days from retirement, conducting the investigation into the Fennan case, begins to work with Smiley. Smiley’s boss (rather late in the day) orders him to drop the case, but a letter posted by Fennan the night before arrives, requesting an urgent meeting that day, confirming his suspicion this is murder! Smiley hands in his badge to pursue the case. Of course these may not have been such tired police procedural cliches in the 1960’s, but that is of limited consolation to a modern reader.

Can you guess what happens next? I suspect you can. Yes, before he can make much progress with the case, Smiley is hit on the back of the head in an alley by a mysterious assailant, and goes out like a light. He has just had time to find the lead that will crack the case, and expose the sinister East German agent who is behind it all.

Yes, there’s a twist, of sorts, but by now you will have got there already. So why does this novel seem so tired and predictable when Le Carre is widely seen as a master of his craft, writer of novels of byzantine complexity where you only find out what really happened on the last page? The Guardian ran an excellent parody of the novel a while back which does a good job of pointing out its combination of cliche, predictability, and improbability. As soon as the long holidays to Austria the Fennan’s took every year (in an era when even everyday civil servants were prohibited from travelling to Eastern Europe) it is obvious they are guilty as hell. There is no way Smiley or anyone would have cleared Fennan on the basis of the cursory chat that passes for an investigation into the allegations against him. As well as being the first Smiley novel this was also Le Carre’s first novel of any kind, and it went on to generate a series that is widely loved and respected, so I shouldn’t be too harsh. Smiley himself is an anti-hero, fat, balding, aging, but becomes over time a formidable spymaster, not that you would necessarily know that from this work alone. I may have ruined my enjoyment of the later books in the series by reading the last one first, but at least I can say I have given Le Carre a run for his (my) money!

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Book review, Muriel Spark, The Driver's seat

The Driver’s Seat, by Muriel Spark, 1970

What a disconcerting, puzzling book this is. At barely 100 pages it is little more than a long short story, but Spark gives the reader a lot to think about in this strange tale of her lead character’s last few hours on earth.

“She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling”. Continue reading →

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