Preamble
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 short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Review
I first picked up Batya Gur’s Michael Ohayon when I was about fourteen, in one of those little bookshelves that many hotels have of things left. By chance, I picked up the very first of the stories (The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case), set in a psychoanalytic society that was just fascinating. Many years later, I thought I might try to finish the series, so bought the remaining five. This is the third of six, and I’ll review the rest as and when I can.
What I’ve particularly enjoyed about reading these ’90s and early-’00s stories is a return to a slightly simpler time for policing. Like watching early Law and Order episodes, there’s something comforting about the general absence of online-ness, smartphones, etc. I also found the detective culture interesting, just like watching Les Engrenages and immersing yourself in the French judicial system, quite distinct from the US or UK structures. Overall, Gur’s novels don’t move at a rapid click, but they have a certain reflective stateliness about them that I’ve enjoyed.
In the usual course of things, Ohayon is injected into a tight-knit community where the community’s secrets have to be unveiled to get to the truth of a killing. This formal structure for the novels begins to fall apart a little towards the end of the series, but there is little more compelling as a closed community than the kibbutz. Poisoned is the kibbutz secretary, Osnat Harel. Is she killed because of her love affair with an outsider? Because of intrigues and generational tensions within the community? Or for some other reason entirely?
Murder on a Kibbutz is billed as a social history wrapped up in a detective story, and I certainly found this element of it intriguing. It is hardly, now, a contemporary social history, but as I am largely interested in historical crime fiction, this wasn’t a worry for me! Gur does offer rather a critical or disillusioned view of the kibbutz, but perhaps this would always be the way with a detective story. Why would murder be afoot if there weren’t plenty of gripes and disagreements simmering under the surface? I don’t think the novel suffers too greatly from having to cast a somewhat critical lens on its setting, and it is interestingly juxtaposed with the more worldly detectives and Osnat’s politician ex.
As to the detective, Ohayon is generally puzzled until the very last second in these novels. He is billed as having great insight into the human condition and human psychology (hence the start with the psychoanalysts), but it is not always clear to the reader how he is applying these insights and coming to the right conclusion. I tend to find him quite endearing, though, as a pretty emblematic repressed detective figure.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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