wot i red on my hols by alan robson (sertor sicarius)

Distaff and Datstaff

I’m currently binge-reading my way through a series of utterly brilliant and alarmingly addictive police-procedural novels by Sally Rigby and I am finding that I rather resent having to put down the one I’m currently reading (Kill Shot – it’s about snooker, in much the same way that The Caine Mutiny is about boats) in order to write this review. Yes, they really are that good!

The books are known as the Cavendish and Walker novels. They are named after their two major protagonists – Dr George (Georgina) Cavendish, a forensic psychologist, and Whitney Walker, a detective chief inspector who is in charge of a serious crime unit.

All the cases investigated by Whitney Walker involve serial killers in some way, shape or form. I’m really not quite sure why I started reading the series (though I’m very glad that I did) because normally I do my best to avoid serial killer novels. All too often I find that they fall into what I tend to think of as the serial killer trope trap where the murderer turns out to be some sort of Machiavellian master mind who sets out to conquer and control their own small corner of the world by indulging in a convoluted and overly melodramatic killing spree. The killers leave deliberate clues on the corpses they create in order to taunt the police. Sometimes they even send gleeful letters to the police saying (effectively) yah boo sucks, can’t catch me for a penny cup of tea. It’s all remarkably unconvincing and silly.  Fortunately, by and large, Sally Rigby does not fall into the trope trap (though I’ll have a bit more to say about this later) and that gives her novels an air of authenticity which makes them stand out head and shoulders above the competition.

Why do I tend to avoid serial killer novels? I think perhaps it’s because I’ve lived in the shadow of two real life serial killers – the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, when I was quite young, and the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, when I was in my twenties. I’ve seen at first hand the effect that serial killers have on the community and the fear that they can engender. When Brady and Hindley were busy torturing and killing children we had extra stranger danger lessons at school. And when Peter Sutcliffe was killing randomly chosen women all over Yorkshire my mother point blank refused ever to leave the house unaccompanied. She was by no means the only woman in Yorkshire to come to that decision. The sigh of relief when Sutcliffe was finally caught could be heard all over the county, and believe me, Yorkshire is a very large county indeed.

The real serial killers themselves all turned out to be (more or less) simple minded people who used their animal cunning to keep out of sight and fly under the police radar so that they could continue their killing spree. They did absolutely nothing to draw attention to themselves. My father met Peter Sutcliffe on several occasions. As far as my dad was concerned, Sutcliffe was just an ordinary bloke...

So trust me, in real life serial killers do not fit the novelistic stereotype in any way, shape or form. And before you raise the question, no – despite what a lot of people believe, Peter Sutcliffe definitely did not send a tape recording (and several letters) to the police taunting them for failing to catch him. The tape and the letters were sent as a practical joke by one John Samuel Humble who was eventually tracked down through the DNA traces he left on one of the envelopes. In 2006, Humble was sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice. So there!

Sally Rigby is very well aware of all these things. Generally speaking, her murderers are ordinary people who live (mostly) ordinary lives. It’s just that every so often they go out and kill somebody. As one does.

The novels are set in the English Midlands, in a fictional city called Lenchester. I’m not quite sure why Sally Rigby felt it necessary to invent a whole new imaginary city in which to set her stories, but it is not without precedent. Ed McBain’s stories of the police force in the (totally fictitious) 87th precinct is probably the archetypal example.

There’s a university at Lenchester and George Cavendish is a lecturer in forensic psychology there. Her expertise is often called upon by the police. She herself is a high-flying academic who comes from an eminent (and grossly over achieving) family – her father is one of the best heart surgeons in the country, her mother is an international human rights lawyer and her brother is very successfully following in his father’s surgical footsteps. One and all, George’s immediate family are snobbish, rude and terribly condescending towards members of the lower classes who they consider to be both their social and intellectual inferiors. Despite their humanitarian professions they are totally lacking in empathy. George, to her credit, can’t stand any of them and she enjoys indulging herself in a certain amount of schadenfreude when they finally get their comeuppance. Mostly she does her best to keep her family at arm’s length. However she cannot completely deny or shrug off her origins and, to a small extent, she does share some of their characteristics.

Whitney Walker, by contrast, left school at seventeen because she was pregnant. After her daughter Tiffany was born she joined the police force as a constable on the beat. She has achieved her current exalted position only after years of slogging her way slowly up through the ranks, desperately trying to balance the requirements of a career with the demands of life as a single mother. That she has succeeded brilliantly at both of these challenges says a lot about her strength of character.

George and Whitney come from completely opposite ends of the British class system. They really couldn’t be two more different people. So it isn’t at all surprising that when Whitney first meets George she is suspicious and quite resentful of George’s silver spoon fed life. She doesn’t believe that George – who she assumes to be an out of touch with real life, upper class, posh academic – can be any help to her at all. But Whitney slowly comes to realise that she was wrong in that initial assumption, and by the end of Deadly Games (the first novel) they have become firm friends, though it is a friendship that will have its ups and downs as the months and years pass by. Whitney’s ability to admit that she can make those kinds of mistakes and her willingness to change her mind and learn from them is one of the major reasons for the success she has made of her career.

As I’ve said before, murderers in general, and serial killers in particular, have a profound effect on the lives of the community at large. Sally Rigby knows this very well and it often plays a large role in her novels. Generally the community becomes withdrawn and afraid when they know they have a serial  killer in their midst, as witness Peter Sutcliffe’s reign of terror in Yorkshire. There is always the niggling worry in everybody’s mind – will I be next? – particularly when the killings are as random as Sutcliffe’s were. But things do not necessarily always have to be that way. In Fatal Justice a series of grotesquely mutilated bodies quickly lead Whitney and George to conclude that a vigilante is targeting, torturing and killing child groomers and paedophiles. Once that news leaks out, the general feeling in the community is one of approval. Surely, because of who they are and what they have done, the murder victims deserve everything that has happened to them? But of course they don’t. All crimes, no matter what their nature, need to be judged impartially in a court of (blind) justice. There are far too many (real life and fictional) examples of the community taking justice into its own hands only to find out later that they had punished, and perhaps even killed, the wrong person. A heat of the moment trial by public opinion is invariably the worst of all possible options. It has no place in a civilised society. Or does it? The discussion of the pros and cons of the ethical dilemmas raised by these opposing opinions makes Fatal Justice one of the strongest, most thoughtful and most profound of Sally Rigby’s novels. So far, despite its gruesome descriptions and repellent subject matter, it is my very favourite.

By contrast, Ritual Demise is, in my opinion, the weakest and least satisfying of Sally Rigby’s books. A series of corpses are turning up in the woods on the outskirts of the city. The corpses are all carefully arranged with their heads resting on a cushion that has been embroidered with a heraldic device. Each corpse has been ritualistically killed in a different, and sometimes rather odd, manner. One body, for example, has had poison poured into its ear…

Aha!

All of the killings had their slightly peculiar aspects but nevertheless they were mostly reasonably straightforward and easy to accept. But as soon as I read about the poison in the ear I knew exactly what was going on. In the Shakespeare play, Hamlet’s father was killed by having poison poured into his ear while he was asleep. Obviously the killer is reproducing a set of Shakespearean deaths though the reasons for doing that seem a bit obscure, at least to begin with…

As an aside, when I first studied Hamlet at school I immediately felt that this was a very implausible murder technique. Surely the man would have woken up when he felt something trickling into his ear? (I once woke up abruptly from a very deep sleep when a cockroach tickled my ear as it crawled over my head. Ears are very sensitive). And just how effectively can a poison be absorbed into the body from the ear canal anyway? Quite serendipitously, I recently discovered that a specialist ear doctor called R. R. Simpson published a research paper in 1950 which investigated both of these questions. The original paper is hidden behind a rather expensive paywall, but public domain references to it suggest that provided the victim was very deeply asleep and provided the poison was both oily and warmed to body temperature the victim could indeed have been poisoned in this manner.

Shakespeare never revealed exactly what poison was used to murder Hamlet’s father but Sally Rigby tells us that the murderer in her novel dissolved cyanide in a solvent called dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO) before introducing it into the ear of the victim. DMSO is slightly oily and is easily absorbed into the body whenever it comes into contact with the skin (or other membranes). Absorption is quite fast and no damage is done to the membranes surrounding the absorption site. Because DMSO is also able to carry other compounds along with itself when it is absorbed intro the body it is quite commonly used by doctors to introduce pharmaceutical drugs into patients through a topical application. So, surreal though it sounds, the technique that the murderer uses in the novel certainly meets all the necessary conditions to make a successful, albeit strikingly unusual, murder weapon!

In an Afterword to Ritual Demise, Sally Rigby confesses that it is one of her favourite novels and a major reason for that is the enormous amount of fun she had researching these kinds of details in order to make the plot seem plausible.

Ritual Demise is the closest that Sally Rigby has come to portraying a stereotypical serial killer. Unfortunately in this novel she has fallen into what I called the trope trap at the start of this review. It’s all far too elaborate, melodramatic and ritualistic to be believable. She partly redeems herself in the end – the lifestyle and upbringing that she has assigned to the killer in combination with the magnificently detailed background research she has done to try and make the story convincing certainly provide a clear and almost (but not quite) plausible motive for the ritualistic nature of the murders. But, for me, the melodrama was too close to the surface for comfort. Certainly the plot is extremely clever, complex and full of fascinating detail, but in the final analysis I think it is rather too ingenious for its own good and it failed to convince me.

I’m definitely praising with very faint damns here – just because I found this book to be the weakest in the series doesn’t mean that it’s a failure as a novel. Far from it – despite my misgivings I lapped it up and thoroughly enjoyed it because Sally Rigby’s other major strength is her ability to draw believable characters. No matter how preposterous the plot, the suspension of disbelief never fails even when people are attempting to cope with the most outrageous of situations. Whitney and her team are all very real people, very easy to identify with. Like everybody else, they have their quirks and foibles, their strengths and weaknesses, their prejudices and their blind spots. They have a life outside of work and sometimes their real life impinges on their performance in the office. And of course, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Fortunately there are no dullards in Sally Rigby’s novels. Life at work and life outside of work are both treated as being of equal importance. It all adds up very satisfyingly and as a result the whole is often far greater than the sum of the parts. All of this helps to rescue Ritual Demise from the trope trap.

I began by describing these books as police procedurals and that’s exactly what they are with the emphasis strongly on the word procedural. There are no great Shelockian deductions to be found in these books, no blinding insights. Just the routine, almost mundane, day to day tasks involved with the checking of alibis and the asking of questions, the answers to which slowly but surely start to fill in the gaps until finally the picture is complete and an arrest can be made. In less skilful hands that might make for a rather boring story – routine is, almost by definition, tedious – but in Sally Rigby’s hands it turns into a joy and a delight as the people we have come to know and love (or at least know and admire) discuss means, motives and opportunities

I’m also hugely impressed by the way that, unlike a lot of other novelists, Sally Rigby does not feel any need to fill her stories with thud and blunder. Her excitements are more cerebral, her thrills more intellectual and as a result her insights are more profound. Consequently there are no riveting car chases in her books, no overly dramatic showdowns, no (not very) tension filled stand offs. Yes, sometimes an arrest goes slightly wrong and accidents happen, but it’s all over very quickly. Drama does not require guns and shouting. Generally speaking a quiet word backed up with a hand on a holstered taser is all that is required. Slow and steady wins the race even if you sometimes have to rugby tackle the chap in front of you in order to reach the finish line.

If you decide to read Sally Rigby’s Cavendish and Walker novels, I strongly urge you to seek out the audiobooks. The narrator, Clare Corbett, is quite brilliant, one of the best I’ve ever heard. She really brings the places, the people and the story superbly to life.

* * * *

I’ve been reading a lot of crime fiction in recent months and almost all of the books I’ve read have been written by women. In one sense that’s not surprising – from the very beginning of the Golden Age of detective fiction, women writers have always predominated and have been hugely influential in the development of the genre. Any serious discussion of the history of crime fiction will invariably centre around Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Highsmith et al. I do not think I would be alone in my opinion that the male writers in the field are often perceived as playing second fiddle to the females. When I’m looking for a meaty crime novel to read I always make a point of choosing women writers over men and I’m seldom disappointed with the results of my choice.

As far as I can tell, crime fiction seems to be the only genre in which this predominance of women writers is considered to be the norm. For example...

Women writers were once very few and far between in the world of science fiction (though this has changed a lot in my lifetime, thank goodness). Indeed, once upon a time science fiction was so male dominated that the very few women who worked in the field often felt constrained either to adopt male (or, at the very least, ambiguous) pseudonyms (James Tiptree, Andre Norton) or to hide themselves behind their initials (C. L. Moore, C. J. Cherryh). Thankfully this practice has also changed a lot and these days it is seldom seen.

Both historical fiction and romance fiction (genres with a huge overlap) have also always attracted a lot of women writers. They seem generally to have been well respected (Georgette Heyer, Mary Renault, Mary Stewart, Rosemary Sutcliff, the list is endless) but they do not appear ever to have dominated the field in the same way that they do in crime fiction. It would be perfectly simple to make an equally endless list of influential male writers in those genres and trying to choose between the members of each list would be supererogatory.

The Mills & Boon / Harlequin Romance / Bodice Ripper genre gives the appearance of being almost exclusively written by women since those are the author names that appear on the book covers. However, perversely, these genres have always been dominated by men in the way that science fiction once was. But this time, in an interesting and amusing role reversal, all of the men are hiding themselves behind female pseudonyms. I once met a policeman who was built like the proverbial brick shithouse. He was six feet tall in every direction. He made some nice pocket money for himself writing bodice rippers and he assured me that he was by no means the only man he knew who was doing that.

I have no idea whether or not we are seeing a statistical anomaly in the crime fiction genre, but coincidence or not, the inarguable fact remains that the very best crime fiction has always been, and continues to be, written by women. I recommend that you seek it out and wallow in it as I have done and as I fully intend keep on doing.