novels – Dominique Gracia

China Miéville – The City and the City (2009)

Preamble

As I read and write and think a lot about detective and crime fiction, I’m starting to put together quick, bite-size reviews of the books in these genres. Sadly, capacity is too limited to cover all the films and TV series I watch too, but these might be added in the future.

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (4.5 out of 5)

I think of The City and the City as a sort of midpoint in Miéville’s authorial arc, although he is of course still active. I first started reading his work with Kraken, which followed The City and the City in 2010, and then made by way back to begin at the beginning of the New Crobuzon novels. I was interested in Miéville’s excavations of imagined possibilities of urban life, but after Railsea (2012), he has largely left the novel genre in favour of non-fiction and short fiction. For better or worse, then, to me The City and the City, with its 2018 TV adaptation starring David Morrissey, feel like high-tide marks for Miéville’s predominance in this particular segment of the literary world.

I did not watch all of that TV adaptation, although I did watch the first episode. David Morrissey’s niche is not really my niche, as an audience member, and I suspect the decision not to keep watching the adaptation kept me away from The City and the City for a little while. But I was glad to come back to this novel after a while away from Miéville’s work.

As a detective story, how does The City and the City compare? The detective figure(s) and the crime they investigate are in some ways standards of the police procedural. Plenty of detective figures share Inspector Borlú’s willingness to bend the rules, commitment to solving a young woman’s murder, and general apathy towards his own life. An incalculable number of detective stories involve an idealistic but duped young woman going to her death, or corrupt officials dressing up their tawdry greed in something esoteric or high-minded to draw in unwitting collaborators. But it is the use to which Miéville puts the tropes and stock figures that is so enjoyable.

As an extended metaphor for the self-deceptions—and other-deceptions!—that are required from us daily to maintain an ‘orderly’ society, often at the expense of someone, somewhere, out of sight and mind, The City and the City shines more brightly now, in the wake of Brexit and Donald Trump, in the grips of a cost-of-living crisis (in Britain, at least), and in the context of more persistently and intransigently fractured political landscapes internationally. What is the cost of our continued blindness, our continued acts of ‘unseeing’? Who will come to get us if we ‘breach’ the social fictions and look directly at what lies on the margin of the everyday?

Detective fiction, and more especially crime fiction, teach us that policing is a hard job, that it requires one to look, again and again, at things that other people only ever see once, and then on the worst day of their lives. That is the message of shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where the police who specialise in the most ‘heinous’ of crimes rail against and steel themselves for continuing to see. It is perfectly natural, then, that this is quite naturally the genre to which Miéville turns for this tale. But there is an irony in that choice. Regular consumers of detective stories will be used to glossing over the crimes themselves, taking the declarations of horror as read, as requisite but not entirely meaningful tropes. A reader reading for the puzzle can easily miss the full sense of the novel, catch it out of the corner of their eye and ‘unsee’ it as they hurry onwards down the narrative street. The City and the City thus acts out its own cautionary tale.

China Miéville’s The City and the City was Book 35 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Matt Wesolowski – Changeling (2019) and Beast (2020)

Preamble

Reviews aren’t guaranteed to be spoiler-free, so read on with caution!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (4 out of 5)

I’m reviewing these two books together because I read them in quick succession – the library actually delivered Beast to me first, so I held out to read them in order! – and because the key points I have are common to both of them.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, both true crime and fiction, and the format of course appeals to me. I’m really interested (in my academic research) in how stories and images are repurposed and reused across different media. So this series is entirely in my wheelhouse. The books are ably written and interestingly plotted. They are not formulaic in a substantive sense – the nature of the crimes and the people who tell their stories are not repetitive across books – although they are of course formulaic within the confines of the genre they mimic. Still, having read through the first four books, I am beginning to feel the confines of the task that Wesolowski has set himself. Looking ahead to Deity (2020) and Demon (2022), and just judging on the titles alone, the final two books of the series don’t seem like they break out of this mould.

There are ostensible supernatural elements to all of the stories, and the probing of their non-supernatural explanations is part of the unfolding of each book’s six episodes: a beast in the wilderness, figures not dissimilar to Slender Man, malevolent fairy folk, a vampire. There are dysfunctional relationships amongst teenagers. There are, of course, six stories. Some other elements recur: internet games, for example, in Hydra (2018) and Beast, or the seemingly popular figure who is a malevolent and manipulative bully in Six Stories (2016) and Beast, or the questionable parents and parenting throughout each book of the series.

For genre fiction of this type, however, one can forgive some repetition; indeed, it’s a common criticism of true-crime podcasts in particular! But one of the things that began to nag at me as I read through books three and four – aside from the book covers referring to each one as “an episode of Six Stories”, which I find irritating, given that they’re each supposed to contain six episodes apiece! – is the tentative nature with which King hovers on the edges of each podcast series. The format increasingly has ‘episodes’ per se and then certain non-episodes around them, such as ‘audio logs’ from King (Changeling). Perhaps I’m being overly demanding in wanting a novel to stick quite strictly to a podcast episode format, but this seems importance given King repeatedly tells us, the ‘listener’, that his goal is not to answer questions but simply to offer up information, and so all that’s important is the six stories within each series.

Although it is a niggly and perhaps formalist point, intuitively I think it relates to the broader issue of King’s presence within the books as a character and as a storyteller.

One of the most intriguing elements of the first book, Six Stories (2016), is that we discovered in the end that Scott King, the Six Stories host, was not in fact responsible for the content that had preceded it. Someone had copied his podcast format and put out the story in his name. I would have expected this to be important in the framing narrative around the subsequent stories, but it in fact disappears from view. I think this is a shame, as it might help us key into the story around the stories.

Books two, three, and four retain King’s reticence to be visible publicly, and Changeling offers something of an explanation by exploring the tragedy of King’s past (his father’s abuse of his mother, and his own kidnap and adoption, repressed until the story unfolds), putting him front and centre. But aside from discomfort with media (and social media) attention, it’s not yet clear what the foundations are for King’s chosen metier. He wants to tell stories, feels the urge to uncover answers, but also simultaneously not to. The methods at Wesolowski’s disposal for shading in King’s character despite the tight confines of the podcast form seem somewhat limited as we go through Changeling and then Beast, where King speaks of himself as beginning to come out of the shadows. It’ll be interesting to see whether the final Act of Six Stories (if we can mix our formalist metaphors for a moment!) will manage to deliver an entry into the spotlight that feels satisfying and fully grounded in the books that preceded it.

Matt Wesolowski’s Changeling and Beast were Books 55 and 56 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

J.M. Hall – A Spoonful of Murder (2022)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (4 out of 5)

Note this is not to be confused with the YA book of the same name by Robin Stevens (which I now absolutely want to read)! Instead, this book is about female characters in their retirement, juggling loyalties to family and friends as they investigate the death of an old colleague, sometimes against their own better judgment.

The challenges of this time of life, of ageing and slow decline, and the death of old friends, and the independence and complications of children and family life, are very well drawn. There is a real empathy and honesty in some of the descriptions of how older people can be exploited and mistreated, by unscrupulous outsiders or by their own families. Anyone with older relatives will recognise the anxieties that go with keeping them safe.

The mystery itself is a good one, with a few different threads well combined in the set-up to allow the main protagonists—a group of retired schoolteachers and friends—to pursue their own lines of inquiry. Their associated B-plots round out the picture in their reflections on motherhood and parent-child relationships. As a narrative whole, it’s well constructed and a nice easy read, notwithstanding the real emotional weight behind the characterisations.

I found it a little hard to keep the main investigating characters straight, struggling to remember which name had which biography. I think this may have been because there was a lack of impactful physical descriptions for them, so my mental pictures of them weren’t very clear, but the voices for their own sections or chapters could perhaps have been more distinct. This detracted from the asymmetrical information pictures each of them was supposed to have, from which some of the tension of good detective stories always arises.

J.M. Hall’s A Spoonful of Murder was Book 52 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Will Carver – Psychopaths Anonymous (2021)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (5 out of 5)

It was a pleasure to return to Maeve, the emergent anti-heroine of Carver’s previous novel, Good Samaritans (or, as I keep imagining it is called, probably subliminaly influenced by the Six Stories series, Six Bottles!). One of the cunning elements of this book is that we are surprisingly far through it before we learn whether it is a prequel or a sequel to Good Samaritans. If you had no idea about the existence of GS, you could still enjoy this book, but it is a much more interesting read afterwards.

The Fight Club elements of this story are much more prominent than its prequel, although the film is referenced explicitly in the latter’s blurbs, and that was in fact one of the things that I found a bit baffling about how Good Samaritans was presented (and perhaps part of why I ended up giving it only four stars). I think it works not only narratively but as a useful structuring device, through which Carver can develop Maeve’s character anew by following her, at least initially, through Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step programme.

Good Samaritans saw Maeve take up Seth’s method of finding murder victims from a pool of strangers, and Psychopaths Anonymous offers an alternative hunting ground of quasi-strangers. There is an ironic element of Old Testament justice in how Maeve constructs her ‘hit list’, named her ‘make amends’ list, despite the fact that the religiosity of AA rankles for her.

The book is relatively slow in creating the group for which it is named—Maeve’s Psychopaths Anonymous—group, posturing across the hall from one of the AA meetings she used to attend, but also doing something real for its attendees. The other members of the group are interesting and vary enough, despite their anonymity, that we get a glimpse of them as real and, largely, functioning members of society. The group quickly spins out into a genuine community and then disintegrates again, with Maeve wishing to free herself of it in order to pursue romantic interests and another member, Eames, disappearing from it in order to protect its membership from the police tracking him.

I find the inclusion of the police/crime-solving element of the novel much more successful than in Good Samaritans, where I think it needed to be either more or less prominent. The police exist as an underlying threat to both Maeve—investigating the disappearance of her sponsor, Gary—and to her group—investigating the murders of attendee Eames. I don’t know either of Carver’s detectives (January David or DS Pace) to understand fully the references to them that might be encoded in the police’s occasional appearances here, but I appreciated their near absence, as largely, this novel feels like a character piece.

Will Carvers’ Psychopaths Anonymous was Book 54 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Frédéric Dard – The Wicked Go to Hell (1956)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (3 out of 5)

The strapline for the 1955 film (this story started out as a play, became a film, and only then became a novel) is a stark encapsulation of one thread from the novel: “a woman uses sex to protect herself”. To me, this doesn’t really describe the novel or its plot, but its 50s sexism acts as a counterintuitive reminder of the importance of the female character in a novel that begins with two men being pitted against each other and follows their relationship through uneasy alliance and back again. The novel could be a textbook example for Sedwick’s homosocial triangle.

The plot had an air of melodrama about it, with a prison break, dangerous intruders at a posh house party, and a surprisingly inhabitable desert island. But I struggled somewhat with the absence of stakes for the plot besides each character’s desire to survive and resignation to not. I had half expected the cat-and-mouse to end in a more permanent alliance, but the impossibility of that outcome feels like part of the point. The mystery of which is the spy and which is the cop – that is to say, which is the cat and which the mouse – is a successful one.

As I was writing this, I realised that I wanted to rate it more highly than I expected. It is the sort of book that fares better in retrospect than during the reading!

Aside – There is also an interesting review on the International Crime Fiction Research Group blog.

Frédéric Dard’s The Wicked Go to Hell was Book 25 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Lucy Foley – The Paris Apartment (2022)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (2 out of 5)

This is the third of Foley’s mystery/crime novels that I’ve read, and I have begun to find her preferred structure somewhat dull and formulaic. There is something a little simplistic in the chronology-building through very short fragmentary chapters. The intellectual challenge that it might take on the author’s side to make sure that each shard of prose delivers a clue or plot development comes at the expense of other modes of developing character, place, and plot. It delivers a rhythm as predictable as a Disney movie.

I did quite like the main protagonist here, Jess, although she was a little thinly drawn. I could have done with seeing more of her brother, Ben. Their family dynamic is by the most interesting in the book, but has to play second fiddle to the ‘secret’ dynamics that Foley’s structure requires in order to have them revealed. Paris is entirely irrelevant to the plot. They could have been virtually anywhere. Given the importance of location in Foley’s preceding two novels, that is a little bit of a shame, but in a way I think we can see her setting choice as an attempt to vary the country house crime fiction trope. The way the apartment building transforms into a country house is an interesting play on models like the recent The Crooked House adaptation that uses radically different interior styles to segment the extended family home.

Although the prefatory material suggests that this is the most complex story structure/plot, I think it’s on a par with both The Hunting Party and The Guest List in terms of sophistication. It was fairly clear who would betray whom, and what the main twists would be (especially when they were framed as ‘dark secrets’). I think, perhaps, I am getting a little tired of detective fiction that treats sexual violence/exploitation in quite the way that Paris Apartment does; it was pretty clear what was coming. (It made me roll my eyes in the same way Antony Horowitz’s The House of Silk did, for exactly the same reason.)

I hope that Foley might play around with her formal approach in her next book, as I do enjoy her work!

Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment was Book 48 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Lucy Foley – The Guest List (2020)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (3.5 out of 5)

I saw this novel on booksellers’ tables for what felt like months and months and months, so in the end I read it. I actually read it before any other Foley novels, and it was good enough to encourage me to read more, of course, so that should be taken as an immediate endorsement. (This is by no means the first time I’ve come into a formal or informal series in media res!)

I thought the location of The Hunting Party (2018) worked in a more convincing way to the one in this novel, which has a certain And Then There Were None resonance but feels a bit ham-handed.

What I found most interesting in this book was the exploration of male friendship and its potential cruelty (a theme in the later Foley novel The Paris Apartment, but only very lightly touched on). This was well done, I think, if somewhat dramatically, and that element was what gave me echoes of Kim Newman’s The Quorum, which revolves around the persecution of one of a group of male friends.

Lucy Foley’s The Guest List was Book 28 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Lucy Foley – The Hunting Party (2018)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (4 out of 5)

I actually read this after I read The Guest List (2020), and I was struck by some of the characters’ similarity, e.g. both novels have a pair of unusually troubled characters, one male and one female, staying at the remote accommodation and responsible for managing the events and operations there. But, fortunately, Foley varies the plots sufficiently that it works! I found it more interesting to explore the nascent relationship between those two figures, as represented in The Hunting Party, than the married couple of The Guest List, as I think it added something to the depth of the plotting.

Aside from the similarities in some of the character types, the pace and structure of both Guest List and Hunting Party are also similar, but they work effectively for the genre. Foley isn’t doing anything particularly ground-breaking here in either novel, but they’re accomplished mystery/crime stories.

I thought the location of this story worked in a more convincing way to the one in The Guest List. The B-plot/red herring (depending on your POV) was interesting and played well with the setting without taking up too much narrative space. Some of the more minor twists weren’t very surprising, but I was caught by the reveal of the killer, perhaps because I had knowledge of the ending of The Guest List and so mentally had it as a template!

Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party was Book 29 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Lynn Shepherd – Murder at Mansfield Park (2010)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Review (5 out of 5)

First, a confession. I am not a great Austen fan. I have read a few of the big names, but not Mansfield Park, from which Shepherd takes her inspiration. Fortunately, however, Shepherd is skilled enough that even the ill-informed reader (like me) cannot get lost, which can often be the case with works that rely on the canon for their premise. I appreciated that care for the breadth of audience.

Shepherd does a wonderful job of retaining Austen’s keen eye for the economic details of upper-class family life and the mechanics of these relationships. Modern readers often manage to miss the importance of these elements in Austen, and the acuity with which the material truths of women’s lives in the early-nineteenth century were drawn, so Shepherd has to work to maintain the subtlety of Austen-as-read-now in a modern version. Economics thus remains a quiet engine of plot, as in Austen’s novels.

The murder mystery at the heart of the story stops just shy of being too modern; a woman dead in the mud, stumbled over, sans wallet, feels very Law and Order: SVU. But it just about fits, and would not of course be out of place in a penny dreadful! The adjacent mysteries are more in keeping with our sense of C19 sensibilities, with poisoning and lunacy looming large, and the plot creeping closer to the genre of Sensation fiction as it progresses.

Perhaps because of that, and my own ignorance of the original’s specifics, I had all sorts of wild thoughts about the possible twists and turns. Might Mary and her brother turn out to be a fiendish married couple in disguise? Might we see an unwitting criminal, à la The Moonstone? But ultimately the novel stays true to the spirit of Austen’s conclusion, with everyone who remains learning a little about (romantic and familial) love and its follies and becoming a little sadder and wiser.

Lynn Shepherd’s Murder at Mansfield Park was Book 42 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Will Carver – Good Samaritans (2018)

Preamble

The ‘see also’ section below gives you a hint of the story, its themes, and its style, and is spoiler-free, but reviews themselves aren’t guaranteed to be thus!

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

A wooden puppet held in someone’s closed fist. Image by Marco Bianchetti from Unsplash.

Review (4 out of 5)

One thing I love most about this genre is its ready accessibility in all libraries, from physical ‘New Release’ shelves through to collections of classics on the Libby app. That’s where I found Will Carver’s Good Samaritans. Its zazzy yellow cover with a dangling wooden puppet is eye-catching, and the two front quotes promise “crime thriller and domestic noir” and “darker than Fight Club“, so okay!

I haven’t read any of Will Carver’s novels before, but he has two series of crime/mystery novels, and this book is the first in the Detective Sergeant Pace series. Genre-wise, the book is definitely crime rather than detective fiction, though. In fact, I was ambivalent about the detective’s inclusion at all.

Good Samaritans follows a set of characters – murders, victims, investigators, and witnesses – through the week leading up to a specific murder and the week thereafter. We alternate perspectives and first- and third-person narration as we move chronologically through the weeks, with shared pre-occupations and neuroses binding the characters beyond their factual interactions in the world. Carver’s plotting allows us plenty of suspense about who dies, when, how, and at whose hands, as all of our characters are desperate for connection and (to a greater or lesser degree) repulsed by themselves. The artificial constraint of following a week either side of a murder means that there is a nice build up of tension to the central death, but a little bit of a rush afterwards to wrap up the plot and rebuild to the final conclusion.

I found the characters’ fixation on wanting to talk more compelling and interesting than the other shared fixation Carver gives them, on cleanliness and feelings of being dirty. This latter underpins the promise on the cover – ‘One crossed wire, three dead bodies, six bottles of bleach’ – but as descriptors of the heart of the novel, they’re a bit misleading (there are more than three dead bodies, for one thing!).

This muddled focus contributed to my ambivalence about DS Pace as he appears in the novel. On the one hand, it seems necessary to have him given that there are multiple murders to solve, and he introduces some element of pressure. His presence (and poor policing efforts) also assist with some of the parallelism in the novel, foreshadowing a second potentially destructive relationship between a killer and an investigator. Otherwise, Maeve’s character cannot really connect to the rest of the cast. However, a tauter and less thematically laboured book could have been produced by leaving him out, or introducing him only at the very end.

Those little niggles aside, Carver does interesting things with some of the typical materials of the genre – a tortured detective, multiple dead women left in fields, and small but disastrous nudges that unhinge precarious people – so Good Samaritans is certainly worth a read!

Aside – In a British-set crime fiction piece, you shouldn’t really call a detective ‘Pace’ without having some intention of including some police misconduct! (The PACE Act 1984 governs police powers.) We get a tiny smidgen of that here, and maybe this is a theme for later novels, but it would be such a fantastic little niche reference, it’s a shame to see it go wasted.

Will Carver’s Good Samaritans was Book 46 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.

Tag Archives: novels

China Miéville – The City and the City (2009)

Preamble

See also

Review (4.5 out of 5)

Matt Wesolowski – Changeling (2019) and Beast (2020)

Preamble

Review (4 out of 5)

J.M. Hall – A Spoonful of Murder (2022)

Preamble

See also

Review (4 out of 5)

Will Carver – Psychopaths Anonymous (2021)

Preamble

See also

Review (5 out of 5)

Frédéric Dard – The Wicked Go to Hell (1956)

Preamble

See also

Review (3 out of 5)

Lucy Foley – The Paris Apartment (2022)

Preamble

See also

Review (2 out of 5)

Lucy Foley – The Guest List (2020)

Preamble

See also

Review (3.5 out of 5)

Lucy Foley – The Hunting Party (2018)

Preamble

See also

Review (4 out of 5)

Lynn Shepherd – Murder at Mansfield Park (2010)

Preamble

See also

Review (5 out of 5)

Will Carver – Good Samaritans (2018)

Preamble

See also

Review (4 out of 5)