wot i red on my hols by alan robson (piscator aprilis)

Poisson D’Avril

Sometimes the needle gets stuck in the groove. I’ve read fifteen novels this month and I thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of them. The books were all written by Ed James who is, unfortunately, frighteningly prolific. So much so that I’ve barely scratched the surface of his enormous back list. Despite that, I think I might try taking a bit of a break next month because I’m starting to forget what other prose styles look and sound like…

I reviewed two of Ed James’ novels last month and they really grabbed my attention. I had no intention of reading another fifteen of his novels this month when I sat down to tackle my enormous To Be Read pile, but it turns out that reading a single Ed James novel is rather like opening a packet of crisps and sticking the first piece of salty, crunchy, umami-tickling goodness into your mouth. You simply can’t stop at just one. So I didn’t.

Last month I read the first two novels of his DCI Rob Marshall series. This month I finished off that series and read the first eight of his DC Scott Cullen series.

The novels are all set in and around the border area between Scotland and England. On the one hand they deal with the social, political, administrative and criminal headaches caused by the amalgamation of the various Scottish regional police forces into the single entity known as Police Scotland. On the other hand each and every one of them is an extremely clever crime novel, dealing in a very satisfactory way with the police investigation into into what are often very ordinary crimes committed by very ordinary people for very ordinary reasons. And on the gripping hand they deal with the personal lives and emotions of both the criminals, the police personnel who investigate the crimes and the people whose lives are impacted by their brush with darkness. More than one major character ends up needing therapy. The psychological impact of what everyone has to go through is never glossed over. Trauma is real and its effects are always acknowledged.

The books are very firmly part of the Tartan Noir genre which means that the crimes they describe are generally rather gruesome murders and the police tend to try coming to grips with what they have to do by indulging themselves in grim and sometimes rather dark bits of humour, often at their own expense.

One of my favourite (though very mild) examples occurs in the Scott Cullen series – in the first few novels we find Scott constantly bemoaning the fact that he’s only a lowly detective constable and that he really deserves to be made a detective sergeant. After all, he tells anyone who will listen, he’s a much better detective than any of the sergeants he reports to, moan, moan, whinge, gringe, whine. Things come to a head one Christmas when Scott’s Secret Santa present from one of his colleagues is a ball gag. Surely that will shut him up? Not a chance. He does eventually get his promotion to sergeant, but only on the strict understanding that he is not allowed to start whining that he hasn’t been promoted to detective inspector yet.

That’s a comparatively harmless and straightforward prank, others are much darker and the mood can change quite dramatically, often within the space of a single paragraph. The prose pulls no punches and there some scenes that are guaranteed to give you nightmares if you are at all sensitive about that kind of thing. Sometimes you may not know whether to laugh, cry or vomit. To be on the safe side, you should probably do all three. In other words, these books are not for people who are overburdened with squeam. Every single story requires multiple trigger warnings. Proceed at your own risk.

These days the UK is very much a multi-racial society and this is reflected in the ethnic make up of the people with whom Scott Cullen and Rob Marshall work and against whom they find themselves deployed. Indians, Chinese, whatever – and every single one of them speaks with a broad Scottish accent and uses Scottish slang. I have no idea why this took me by surprise. It certainly shouldn’t have done. After all I grew up in the West Riding of Yorkshire surrounded by Indian and Pakistani children all of whom spoke with the same broad Yorkshire accent that I did. I even knew one young Pakistani lad who had red hair! And my first serious girlfriend was an utterly delightful lady called Yasmin. Nevertheless Ed James’ multi-ethnic characters speaking Scottish and tucking into haggis and chips with every evidence of enjoyment continued to surprise me. Weird or what?

Although Scott Cullen and Rob Marshall are very different people with very different outlooks on the way the world works, the nature of their jobs means that they have a lot in common with each other. Both have to live through personnel changes in their (often rather tightly knit) teams as bureaucratic short-sightedness comes and goes, and both have to suffer the slings and arrows of incompetent colleagues. This last is particularly well portrayed in the Scott Cullen series where Cullen’s boss, Brian Bain, is shown to be not only incompetent but also thoroughly poisonous as well. Bain cannot say a single sentence without indulging himself in four letter expletives and misogynistic "jokes" to the extent that the pages in which he appears are sometimes rather painful to read. Fortunately Bain eventually gets his comeuppance in a particularly satisfying way – not that it has any ameliorating effect on what he says and does, but at least it makes the reader, and the targets of Bain’s vicious tongue, feel that some sort of justice has been done.

Before Rob Marshall joined the police force he was a profiler specialising in the analysis of serial killers. He became somewhat disillusioned with the black arts of profiling and joined the police as a direct entry with the rank of detective inspector in an effort to put what little expertise he had to more practical uses. Initially, because of his background, he is called upon to deal with what appear to be serial killers. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t, but in every case the novels subvert the serial killer tropes in a very refreshing way. There are no Machiavellian murderers enacting complex and convoluted fantasies here, no taunting notes sent to the police, no deliberately planted clues designed to mislead. Instead the killers are (ultimately) shown to be rather sad individuals spurning the limelight and doing their best not to be noticed. And along the way the novels manage to put both positive and negative spins on the way that profiling works. Sometimes there are valuable insights to gained, but equally often the profile proves to be completely unconnected to reality, leaving the profilers with egg on their faces.

Scott Cullen, on the other hand, is a much more traditional police officer. Unlike Rob Marshall, he joined the police force as a uniformed constable and, after several years experience at the coal face, became a detective with a murder investigation team, again as a lowly constable. His reasons for joining the police force are somewhat obscure. He has a degree in English Literature, a background which, one would assume, would make him uniquely unsuited to a career in law enforcement. Nevertheless he quickly proves himself to be an efficient officer with a clear insight into what I suppose might be thought of as the workings of the criminal mind. Perhaps the analysis of literary texts really does aid in the understanding of the human condition.

Mainly the crimes that both these officers have to deal with are quite mundane. There is very little of the melodrama that a lot of other crime novelists are so fond of. Though having said this, on occasion the murders they investigate do become more than a little esoteric. One of the Scott Cullen novels, for example, concerns itself with an investigation into the death of a man whose corpse has been slowly dissolving in a cask of whisky for the last eighteen years. I suppose that adds a whole new dimension to the concept of a drink with a lot of body to it…

As always, the killer turns out to be an ordinary person with ordinary motives. It just so happens that the murderer has access to a distillery which gives them a unique opportunity to dispose of the victim’s remains.

On the rare occasions when Ed James does actually indulge himself in melodrama, he is not always convincing. One novel is a thoughtful and insightful discussion of the problems of vigilantism which is somewhat marred by having the vigilante himself dress up in a Batman costume while he takes his revenge on the criminals that the police seem to be unable or unwilling to prosecute. As a result, it’s all rather silly and unconvincing.

Both series of novels eventually coalesce around attempts to arrest the man who controls the local drug scene and the seemingly fruitless efforts of the police to bring him to justice. His identity is not a secret, the police are well aware of who he is and what he does, but time and again he manages to wriggle out from under whatever it is the police are trying to pin on him this time. This infuriating state of affairs is eventually resolved in two quite different ways in each of the series – a tribute, if one was needed, to Ed James’ extremely clever plotting.

An underlying theme in both series is the manner in which investigations can be hampered because of police corruption. One of the reasons that the drug king-pins get away with so much for so long is because they have members of the police force on their payroll(s). This is a very common theme in American crime fiction, but it seldom appears in British crime fiction perhaps because (apart from the notoriously corrupt Metropolitan force) in real life there is very little corruption in the UK police and what little there is is never swept under the carpet when it is discovered.

Again, in both series, Ed James demonstrates his ingenuity by giving his corrupt officers very different reasons for their actions and there are also very different outcomes for the officers involved. It’s all extremely satisfying to read!

There is surprisingly little information about Ed James himself on the web, but on his home page he does reveal that in a former life he was an IT project manager. Any police procedurals set in the twenty-first century will invariably require the officers to use computers and here Ed James’ background stands him in very good stead indeed. It’s really rather refreshing to hear the characters in his novels use computer jargon correctly and it is even more refreshing to hear the characters explain the jargon in understandable terms to their less technologically sophisticated colleagues. Computer technology is so much a part and parcel of everyday life these days that I find myself becoming more and more irritated by novelists who use it and its vocabulary incorrectly. To be fair, most of them do get it almost (but not always quite completely) right, though far too many of them are overly fond of the jargon term mainframe – a term and a concept that dates from at least the 1960s and which is becoming more and more obsolete and more and more irrelevant as time goes by. Nevertheless it constantly pops up in stories and it never fails to annoy me when it does. But, thank goodness, you’ll find no mainframes in Ed James’ novels, and they are all the better for it.

I promise I’ll try not to over obsess on Ed James novels in the future, though having said that I must disclose that I have yet to read any novels in his DI Fenchurch series or his DS Vicky Dodds series or his Craig Hunter series or his Max Carter series or…