The sleuth with the outsider’s eye is a convention as old as the crime genre itself, but Jess Kidd gives it an interesting twist in her latest novel, Murder at Gulls Nest (Faber, £16.99). Set just after the second World War, the story opens with the Carmelite nun Sister Agnes travelling from the North of England to the titular boarding house in Gore-on-Sea on the Kent coast, where – now released from her vows, and having reverted to Nora Breen – she sets about investigating the disappearance of her friend Frieda Brogan, much to the dismay of the harassed Insp Rideout.
Observant of the “little everyday things others might not notice”, Nora discovers that Gulls Nest is a hotbed of intrigue, jealousies, sexual tension and sinister eccentricities; and when a mysterious death that might well be connected to Frieda’s disappearance occurs shortly after Nora’s arrival, her investigation becomes considerably more urgent.
Kidd is a beautiful stylist, and tends to give her plot twists a rather gothic flavour, but her strongest suit is her characters. The Mayo native Nora Breen is to the fore in this regard: a self-described “middle-aged Joan of Arc”, Nora considers herself “formidable but fun”, a characterisation it would be unwise to disagree with, at least to her face. In Insp Rideout, however, Nora might have finally met her match. Nora is a listener, intuitive and spiritual; Rideout, a battle-scarred veteran, prefers the rational approach: “We want death, like life, to have a reason. Every action pegged, every motive understood, every coincidence unpicked. Otherwise, what is there but chaos?” Naturally, they join forces, in the process forming an unusual but beautiful friendship that augurs well for Kidd’s latest series.
Sharon Dempsey’s After the Party (Pegasus Elliott MacKenzie, £10.99) opens with Belfast university student Georgia “stalking Hugh”, a fresher at college – albeit a new face that Georgia seems to know all too well. Hugh, we discover, was one of the three boys who raped Georgia the previous year at a house party; now Georgia is planning to destroy Hugh’s life.
But having lured us into the story, Sharon Dempsey switches point of view and rewinds to the previous year: the majority of the novel is told from the perspective of Lydia, Colette and Helena, the mothers of the three boys who stand accused of raping Georgia. It’s an authorial high-wire act: the three women are instinctively protective of their beautiful boys, all of whom are ostensibly upstanding, rugby-playing scions of wealth and privilege; behind closed doors, some of the women are contemptuous of, and in some cases violent to, their husbands.
[ Author Jess Kidd: ‘My daughter said: Mum, do you think you might be autistic?’Opens in new window ]
Gradually the lines become blurred, the boys’ innocence is revealed to be questionable at best, and the ethics of their legal defence are bent out of recognisable shape. “There is no going back,” Colette decides. “Life is never that simple, because the world isn’t fair in the way you think it is. We all have to fight for what’s ours and play the game. There’s no longer right and wrong, only degrees of both.”
Complex, courageous and hard-hitting, After the Party is genuinely unsettling, in the way all serious crime fiction should aspire to be.
Having established her reputation with a series of Agatha Christie-influenced mysteries set on the Inishowen Peninsula, Andrea Carter’s latest offering is the stand-alone thriller There Came A-Tapping (Constable, £18.75). The novel opens in 1890 at Raven Cottage in the Slieve Bloom mountains, where Eliza Dunne is sought out as a healer by the local women and reviled as a witch by the men.
Dunne’s story, we quickly realise, is being written in the present day by Allison Garvey, who lives in Dublin with her partner Rory. Anxious, insomniac and prone to catastrophic thinking, Allison presumes the worst when Rory fails to come home one night after filming a documentary in Galway; and matters become considerably more stressful when she discovers that Rory has bizarrely sublet the lease on their apartment, obliging Garvey to move to the rundown Raven Cottage, where she first encounters Dunne’s history.
A serendipitous discovery? Or has Rory, always a persuasive charmer, become even more subtly controlling in his absence? The early allusions to Edgar Allen Poe alert us to Carter’s gothic intentions, and subsequent supernatural sights and sounds confirm that There Comes A-Tapping is an ambitious reimagining of domestic noir.
“We know that our lives stand on shaky ground, depend on caprice, luck, misfortune and strange coincidences,” says Júlía, the narrator of Snæbjörn Arngrímsson’s One True Word (Pushkin Vertigo, £18.99; translated by Larissa Kyzer). “And still, we’re caught unawares.” In this, as well as much else, Júlía is being disingenuous: after all, Júlía deliberately abandoned her husband Gíó on a rocky islet in a remote Icelandic fjord, leaving him to freeze to death or swim to shore, so it’s not exactly the case that she has been blindsided by fate when the police turn up to investigate his disappearance.
It is the kind of fuzzy logic, however, that characterises Arngrímsson’s approach to storytelling: Júlía, who candidly tells us that she enjoys telling lies, is such an unreliable narrator that she frequently confuses, deceives and contradicts herself, ducking into long, meandering blind alleys as she belatedly seeks definitive proof that Gíó was guilty of the crime she punished him for.
‘Books don’t have to about anything,’ reads a placard Júlía spots in a publisher’s window, ‘they just have to lead their own lives.’ Júlía, a devotee of Karl Ove Knausgård, John Fowles and Italo Calvino, doesn’t tell us whether she agrees; but Agatha Christie, whose Miss Marple novels Júlía reads “because I wanted to learn how to write murder mysteries”, would very likely demur.
Margaret Thatcher’s Britain provides the backdrop to Adam Macqueen’s The Inalienable Right (Eye Books, £9.99), the third novel to feature the former Piccadilly Circus rent boy-turned-amateur detective Tommy Wildeblood. It’s 1987, and Tommy has long since cleaned up his act: now Alex Hargreaves, he’s teaching at his local comprehensive, in a long-term relationship with Ryan, and learning to live with his HIV-positive diagnosis.
It’s a quiet enough life, all things being relative, although Alex has concerns that are personal and political. His old pal Lee has disappeared without trace (“These days, when someone went off the radar, you had to assume the worst.”); meanwhile, the Tory response to the Aids crisis is to insert Clause 28, also known as “the anti-gay clause”, into the local government Bill. Tying the issues together is Peter Morrison, Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary and a rabid homophobe in public, albeit one who was secretly Lee’s most generous, and brutal, customer back in the day.
Rooted in historical fact, Macqueen’s fictionalised account is reminiscent at times of David Peace’s Red Riding quartet as Hargreaves, teaming up with Daily Mirror journalist Sandra Hollowood, discovers a history of institutionalised sexual abuse and paedophilia that goes right to the heart of the British establishment, with Hargreaves the most dangerous kind of loose cannon: “Because it turned out that knowing you’re dying anyway lends you a refreshing recklessness. I might be on the way out, but at least I might be able to take a few of the bastards with me.”
- Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
