Gay Marris – A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder (2024)

Preamble

As I read and write and think a lot about detective and crime fiction, I review on the theme. Sadly, capacity is too limited to cover detective films and TV series too! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Or you can take a look at my collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: order now!

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See also

These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!

• Honour (Elif Shafak)
• A Long Way Down (Nick Hornby)
• The People on Platform 5 (Claire Pooley)

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Review

I’m grateful to the author and publisher for the Advanced Reader Copy (via NetGalley). The book is due to be published in June 2024.

I’m not 100% sure that I should be writing a review of this book here because this book isn’t a detective story. It’s not a cosy mystery, because there’s no detective, and there’s no mystery being unravelled. And it’s not exactly crime fiction either. Instead, this book is an intricate set of case studies about how we (mis)understand our neighbours and our loved ones, and the things that drive people to kill—or worse.

Slightly unfortunately for this book, I think the worst bit of writing comes in the first two pages. It was sufficiently purple that I wasn’t entirely sure about carrying on, but as it was a NetGalley read, and two pages didn’t seem like a fair shot, I kept going. And you’ll see that I’ve given this book five stars. That’s not a mistake! I really did love this. Once the real action commences, Marris settles into her tone, which helps unify what are really a set of discrete stories. If she’d wished, this could have easily been a short story collection on a theme, but the book is presented as a novel, and in the absence of a detective to unify the distinct tales, or episodes, we have the friendly local vicar, Desmond O’Reilly, and his wife, Deirdre, who bob in and out of the various stories, with more or less critical roles, as well as getting a short one all to themselves.

Early on, it wasn’t entirely clear whether the tales would cohere around a single driving narrative. I did half hope for the return of the stray-animal collecting, Elspeth, but to no avail, and the episode in which she features is perhaps the least well connected to the remainder of the stories that unfurl. This was a slight shame, especially as it was the episode that featured immigrant characters. In general, however, Marris is careful about weaving in some circularity across the stories, which helps tie the book together, with life stories drawing out over multiple episodes that lend depth and nuance. A particular favourite was young Colin’s story, for its drama and humour.

Marris’ skill is in warmly and humorously tackling very serious and sometimes scary topics: family members trapped together in loathing, male violence against women and girls, the fear that every parent feels when their child is sick or hurt, the crushing consequences of purity culture for young women and their children. These are small, domestic horrors; that is exactly part of their horror. Her characters and their impulses, yearnings, misunderstandings, and (un)certainties ring delightfully true, and so the unpleasantness slips by, only to catch up with us later.

I would strongly recommend this book as a summer read when it comes out!

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If you like cosy mysteries and short fiction, take a look at my collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: order now!