wot i red on my hols by alan robson (et tu Hugo)

Hide the Ides.

Mur Lafferty likes science fiction and she likes murder mysteries. What could be more natural than for her to combine those two interests into a science fictional murder mystery novel? And that’s exactly what she’s done with Station Eternity.

I like science fiction and I like murder mysteries. What could be more natural than for me to read Station Eternity? What could possibly go wrong? The short answer is, absolutely nothing at all.

Mallory Viridian was born and brought up in a small town where everyone knows everybody else’s business. This makes life very difficult for her because people are constantly being murdered all around her. This does not make her popular – in fact it makes her both a suspect and a social pariah. In self defence, she has to solve the murders, if only to prove that she didn’t do them herself. Fortunately she is very, very good at solving murders…

Things come to a head when she attends a major sporting event with her boyfriend. He gets down on one knee and proffers a ring, an offer he immediately withdraws when he, together with a million or so cameras that are recording the game, glance over Mallory’s shoulder and realise that a woman is being brutally murdered two rows behind her. Whatever it is that Mallory has, it really doesn’t amount to all that much of a superpower and she really, really, really needs to get away from it all, if only to avoid the social embarrassment of events such as these.

Fortunately for Mallory, the aliens have recently landed, and while they haven’t actually welcomed Earth with open arms into a galactic federation, they are mildly interested in Earth and the people who live there. Mallory piques their curiosity and they allow her to take refuge on a sentient space station far away from Earth. There are no people on the station, ergo nobody can get murdered in her vicinity. Actually that statement is not quite true, there are two other humans on the station, but, so far so good, neither of them have (yet) been murdered. Perhaps the population is too low for her grisly superpower to kick in.

For a time, her new existence is indeed peacefully quiet and markedly devoid of any homicides. But then Mallory discovers that the aliens’ attitude towards the people of Earth has become somewhat more relaxed. She learns that shuttles full of people are en route to the station to take advantage of the new policy and Mallory is horribly afraid that when they arrive her odd power will reassert itself. People (and maybe aliens) will start to die and, as usual, only Mallory will be able to solve the murders. But in a closed community like a space station, the solution(s) may prove to be far too little and far too late.

The story is a jolly romp, despite its bloodthirsty overtones. It’s fast moving and full of delightful humour. The aliens are inventive (and also pleasingly alien – they are definitely not human beings with craggy foreheads). Among other amusing touches, we learn in passing that the aliens are rapturously enamoured with Vegemite, thus causing a worldwide surge of interest in Australian culture! Mur Lafferty herself is American, but I assume that at some time in her life she must have travelled to Australia and been introduced to Vegemite. I’d really like to know whether she she loved it as much as her aliens do, or whether she’s being ironic…

Still, look on the bright side, clearly she somehow managed to avoid the perils of the drop bears, and she got back home unscathed.

If you like science fiction and if you like murder mysteries I’m sure you’ll like Station Eternity.

* * * *

The title is by far and away the very best thing about Drew Hayes’ novel The Utterly Uninteresting And Unadventurous Tales Of Fred The Vampire Accountant. Unfortunately the title turns out to be both descriptive and prescriptive and Fred’s unadventures are indeed utterly uninteresting. The word unoriginal should probably have been included somewhere in the title as well for the story is nothing more than a perfectly ordinary vampire novel with thud and blunder werewolves thrown in for good measure and light relief.

Somehow the novel has managed to spawn eight sequels (none of which have interesting titles) so I presume that somebody, somewhere must have liked the first book enough to request more of the same. Your mileage may vary…

* * * *

Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders is a murder mystery about murder mysteries. The protagonist, Malcolm Kershaw, runs a bookshop specialising in crime fiction. He is an aficionado of the genre and he once wrote a blog post in which he discussed eight novels that, in his opinion, featured perfect crimes – eight undetectable murders of genius…

On the one hand, Malcolm’s blog was just a marketing exercise, an attempt to boost trade to his bookshop. But on the other hand, Malcolm really does think that the eight novels he discusses in detail do actually represent not only perfect examples of the murder mystery genre, but they also define recipes for committing a perfect crime in the real world.

And then, out of the blue, the FBI turn up to question him about a series of killings that they feel may have been inspired by the novels discussed in his blog post. Malcolm finds himself dragged in to the investigation, partly because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the crime genre and partly because he is an obvious suspect in the killings. The plot gets murkier as we start to discover that Malcolm does indeed have secrets of his own. But are they lethal ones? Is he a murderer? Well…

The novel is (mostly) a celebration of the mystery genre itself, a meta-novel if you like. It laughs at the genre’s literary conventions, but at the same time it is full of praise for many of the field’s best (and sometimes for its more under appreciated) works. The surface plot thickens nicely as Malcolm tries to piece together the puzzle and at the same time attempts to come to terms with his own feelings of guilt about his crimes of both omission and commission. And underneath the surface the literary references come at you thick and fast.

It’s not hard to figure out who dunnit and even why they dunnit, but I’m not sure it really matters. The fun of this book comes from the thrill of the chase, and the uncertainty surrounding the smaller mysteries that the larger plotline presents along the way. It’s all very, very satisfying indeed.

However there is a (possibly unimportant) downside. The author discusses Malcolm’s eight perfect (literary) murders in great detail and presents huge spoilers for them. These spoilers are very necessary for the working out of the cunning plot of this story but if you haven’t read these eight novels yet you may want to postpone your reading of this one until you have.

The eight (spoiled) novels are: The A.B.C. Murders (Agatha Christie), Strangers on a Train (Patricia Highsmith), The Red House Mystery (A. A. Milne), Malice Aforethought (Anthony Berkeley Cox), Double Indemnity (James M. Cain), The Drowner (John D. MacDonald), The Secret History (Donna Tart) and Deathtrap (Ira Levin) – this last is a play rather than a novel.

Also, a lot of other crime novels are referenced without spoilers along the way. So beware, if you read Eight Perfect Murders you may well find yourself adding many more books to your to be read pile. Be careful it doesn’t topple over and squash you beneath its weight.

Kill Your Darlings is another brilliant tour de force from Peter Swanson. In this one we are introduced to Thom and Wendy Graves who have been married to each other for more than twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful house. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at the university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up and has left home to live his own life. Their life is perfectly idyllic, full of the trappings of success.

Except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.

Why does she want to kill him so passionately? After all, they were childhood sweethearts. Surely they are living their dream? Has the dream turned into a nightmare, or was it always a nightmare?

In order to appreciate their story properly it is necessary for us to go back step by step through the highlights (and the lowlights) of their lifetime together. The story starts in 2023 and it ends in 1982 when Thom and Wendy were each fourteen years old (they share a birthday).

To be honest, detailing Thom and Wendy’s life in reverse does sound a lot like literary wankery, a triumph of form over fiction and style over substance. But it really isn’t. The story will keep you guessing all the way, constantly changing your understanding of the situation as more details are revealed. It would not be nearly as enthralling if it was told forwards rather than backwards.

And of course as a result of the upside down structure, you won’t really understand the how and the why, you won’t fully appreciate the murder and the mayhem, until you’ve read the last chapter, which reveals just how Thom and Wendy first met and what it was that they did that bound them so irrevocably together. Indeed, it won’t all come together until almost the very last word and then, when you’ve read that last word, you will feel like cheering as the whole story suddenly clarifies itself. It’s an extraordinarily clever bit of plotting. You can’t help but admire it.

* * * *

Those of you who have read Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon and/or seen John Huston’s magnificently definitive film starring Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart, will be well aware that the story ends on a kind of a cliffhanger. Is it possible to spoil a novel that is almost a century old and which is very much part of our cultural DNA? Oh well, just in case…

SPOILER

The falcon, which the protagonists have always assumed to be made of solid gold encrusted with jewels and then disguised with thick a layer of black paint, turns out to be a fake. It is made of painted lead, and it is worthless.

END OF SPOILER

Max Allan Collins continues Hammett’s story in Return of the Maltese Falcon. Note that this is definitely not a sequel to Hammett's novel, rather it is a continuation of the same story so it is important to have at least a nodding acquaintance with the original before embarking on this one.

A week has gone by since the events of the original novel. Sam Spade is back in his office, pleased that he has managed to put Brigid O’Shaughnessy in jail for her part in the murder of his partner Miles Archer. He himself had no great love for Archer. Their partnership was on the rocks, mainly because Sam was having an affair with Archer’s wife, and as a result Archer was preparing to leave the partnership for fresh fields and pastures new when he was killed. But despite their enmity, Spade had felt duty bound to do his best for the man. He is pleased to have brought some closure to the affair.

Then, as always happens in all the best private eye novels, a gorgeous blonde turns up in his office. She is Rhea Gutman, the daughter of Kasper Gutman, the infamous villain from Hammett’s original novel and arbiter of all things related to Maltese Falconry. Claiming poverty, she persuades Sam to seek out the falcon on her behalf. It represents her only hope of financial stability…

Ironically, she is not the only person looking for the falcon. In quick succession, Sam Spade is also hired by Dixie Monahan, a Chicago gangster chancing his luck, Corrine Wonderly, the younger sister of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Steward Blackwood, an official from the British Museum who claims that institution is the true owner of the Falcon. Sam simply pockets all their retainers and hopes against hope that it will all sort itself out in the end.

Spade, a former Continental Operative (though he is not Hammett's famously anonymous Continental Op) is not the most moral of men. He plays by his own rules, a habit that makes a lot of people assume that he is a crook. Spade claims that assumption misses the point. Well maybe, maybe not. This is detective fiction at its most deliciously noir and a certain amount of moral ambiguity is only to be expected.

Collins has captured Hammett’s voice and milieu impeccably – it would be perfectly possible to republish The Maltese Falcon with the text of Collins’ novel following on directly from where Hammett left off. No one would ever know. I’m not sure if that’s artistry, plagiarism or literary necrophilia and to be honest I don’t really care. Because what the novel actually is, is a whole lot of fun.

* * * *

Ed James is a frighteningly prolific author – he has written something on the order of fifty novels spread across half a dozen distinct (though interconnected) series. This is very depressing, because I’ve just read two of his novels, and I thoroughly enjoyed them both. How am I going to catch up with his enormous output before I pop my clogs? Will he continue to churn them out faster than I can read them?

It’s not like I haven’t had plenty of chances – I’ve just checked my records and it seems that I reviewed an Ed James novel in 2016 when he had considerably fewer books to his name, and while I certainly enjoyed it, I clearly wasn’t inspired enough to seek out more of the same. If only I’d paid more attention to what I said about him a decade ago I might have managed to keep up with Ed James’ accelerating production rate. But better late than never, I suppose…

Ed James is Scottish and his novels (at least the ones that I’ve read so far) take place in and around the Scotland/England border. I suppose that makes him part of the Tartan Noir movement, and certainly his books exhibit the gruesome detail and sardonic gallows humour that are characteristics of the genre.

The Turning of our Bones and Where the Bodies Lie are the first two novels in a series involving Detective Inspector Rob Marshall. Marshall began life as a criminal profiler but he began to feel that profiling was rather too distancing for comfort – he felt isolated from the work that the police were doing with his profiles and eventually he applied to join the police. He was accepted as a direct entry with the rank of Detective Inspector. Since he never actually served his time at the coal face he has to put up with  certain amount of resentment from colleagues who earned their rank by following more traditional promotion paths, but he’s resigned to that. He’s been a Detective Inspector now for ten years and he suspects that he will stay at that rank for the rest of his career. Not that he really minds – the job satisfaction he was seeking when he changed careers is still there and despite his growing disillusionment with the practice of profiling, the knowledge he gained from that experience continues to stand him in good stead, giving him valuable insights into the crimes he is called on to investigate. He also has personal traumas to contend with from past events that sometimes impinge on the cases he is involved with. By and large he copes well with them, but nevertheless they take their toll…

The Turning of Our Bones opens in London, of all places. Rob is working for the Metropolitan police, and has been for quite some time. For various reasons (which will not become clear until towards the end of the story) he has moved away from Scotland and he has no intention of returning. He is working on identifying a serial killer who has been abducting, torturing and killing young women. But the killer turns the tables on him and ambushes Marshall, shooting and seriously wounding his partner. Marshall himself only escapes injury by sheer luck. The killer vanishes into the night. Two years pass…

The killer’s dead body is found in the small Scottish town of Melrose. That’s Marshall’s home town, and he is seconded to the investigation into who killed the killer, and why. And so, reluctantly, he returns to the place where he grew up, a place filled with tormenting memories. But, to an extent at least, the journey proves to be cathartic and by the end of the novel, to nobody’s surprise, he decides to stay permanently.

The plot is complex and convoluted, which is very satisfying in and of itself, but the colleagues he finds himself working with are a delightfully eccentric bit of icing on the cake. By the end of the story I was enjoying their interactions so much that I immediately started reading the second novel and I found myself loving it just as much as I loved the first one.

In Where the Bodies Lie, an old case comes back to life. A decade ago, long before he joined the police force, Rob Marshall had been a profiler working on the investigation of a particularly gruesome series of killings. His work eventually led the killer’s capture and for the last ten years the man has been rotting in prison. But there are still some loose ends to the case  – although the man admitted to killing nine people, only six of the bodies were ever found. Now the killer says he is willing to disclose the burial place of one of the missing victims. Rob is initially rather sceptical. Why would killer suddenly want to start talking again? It turns out that a true crime podcaster has been interviewing the man and the killer’s willingness to disclose the body’s location makes for valuable publicity.

Rather reluctantly, Rob arranges for the killer to be escorted to where he claims the body is buried. The man takes them to a lonely forest on the banks of the Tweed. There they do indeed find the remains of his victim, and a more thorough search turns up the bodies of the remaining two victims as well. But, to everybody’s surprise the search also uncovers three more relatively recently buried bodies, Clearly the new bodies could not have been killed and buried by this man. He’d been safely locked away in prison when they died. So who has been encroaching on the killer’s territory? Did he have a collaborator on his original killings or is a copycat killer following in his footsteps? Perhaps it is all just a coincidence? Rob Marshall doesn’t believe in coincidences. The hunt is on, and the final explanation for the plethora of bodies is truly astonishing.

The story is told from various points of view. Rob is not the only detective working on the case – his (eccentric) colleagues are also closely involved and seeing the events transpire from their viewpoints and understanding the insights they provide makes for a very satisfying and well-rounded story indeed.

I finished the book with a great big grin on my face. Only another forty five or so more books to go…