Susan Hill, “A Question of Identity”

Why is Susan Hill not yet a household name in the U.S.? She is as good a writer, as reliably satisfying and interesting, as her peers Elizabeth George, Deborah Crombie, Ruth Rendell (though admittedly not as weird as the last). Her detective, Simon Serrailler, is dashing, talented, and complicated; Hill isn’t afraid of letting us dislike him. The requisite murder mystery sidekicks — his sister, his parents, his staff — are given believable occupations and preoccupations. Yet very often when I ask devotees of the genre if they know Hill’s work, they shake their heads. If American readers know Susan Hill, it’s usually as the author of The Woman in Black, which was made into a film with Daniel Radcliffe.

In fact, her seven murder mysteries are all excellent. They’re solid procedurals, but Hill has a quirky imagination and also understands that, in the 21st century, the Golden Age formula for the satisfying solution feels inauthentic. Life is messier than that. We can’t expect Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey to fix everything in the last five pages. When murder is done, people stay broken, and Hill acknowledges that while providing the fast-moving puzzle we mystery readers want.

So, briefly, here’s the situation in A Question of Identity. Three elderly women are murdered. The culprit is acquitted, but because feeling in the community is so strongly against him, he’s whisked off into what we call a “witness protection program” in the US. He’s given a new identity. Ten years go by and in Lafferton, the cathedral town where these novels are set, another old woman is strangled with an electrical cord.

There aren’t so very many patterns for creating suspense in murder mysteries, and Susan Hill has used them all. This time, the reader has information that the detectives don’t. We can’t identify the murderer, but we have a pretty good idea why he does what he does. What lifts this novel beyond the usual escapism is the way Hill draws all the subsidiary characters into the central rumination about identity. How do we construct it? What happens when it breaks down, or must be adjusted? Simon’s sister the doctor Cat Deerbon has to contemplate a career shift. His stepmother’s marriage is threatened and she needs to redefine who she is as a wife. His oldest niece and nephew are adolescents, so there you go. Everyone’s questioning their identity. Except, of course, the murderer’s victims who won’t get the opportunity.

Susan Hill, “The Betrayal of Trust”

Goddesses: Three Graces at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, sculptor unknown

OK, it’s official. Susan Hill enters the contemporary murder mystery pantheon, along with the goddess Tana French and the goddess Fred Vargas. Why, you may wonder, are these women deities in my little firmament? Because they consistently deliver entertainment that is also challenging. Because they work in a traditional genre and make it contemporary. Because they divert and provoke at the same time. And because they write so darn well.

I’ve posted about Susan Hill before and I’ve liked all of her books, but The Betrayal of Trust may be the best yet. A discerning friend theorizes that Hill is working on a series of twelve Simon Serrailler novels and he may be right. There’s something very intentional about the way she plants story lines and leaves them unfinished — it reminds me of the later Patrick O’Brian books. You don’t so much have a sense of the author being obliged to fill you in on the sidekicks and incidental characters (which I felt in Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie), as a sense of groundwork being laid. Hill trusts us to be patient.

The precipitating factor here is a terrible tempest that floods the moor near Lafferton and exposes a skeleton. It turns out to be the remains of a fifteen-year-old girl who vanished on a sunny day sixteen years earlier — a cold case, in fact.  Serrailler catches the case but this is clearly contemporary Britain, because his struggles have as much to do with budgets as criminals. Budget constraints are also threatening Imogen House, the hospice where Simon’s sister Cat Deerbon works. Cat, in fact, is besieged on all sides; by grief, by overwork, by her children’s reactions to her husband Chris’s death.

What I most admired in this book was the fact that Hill let Simon be an outright jerk. He’s always been complicated, and Hill has sketched in the family background to justify that. But now, whether it’s the onset of middle age or the pressure of work or his always dangerous arrogance, he oversteps the bounds. He’s truly horrible to Cat, callous with his colleagues, inconsiderate at best with his new love-interest. (Gotta say the True Love plot thread did not entirely ring true to me, but maybe it’s there to humble Simon, a book or two down the road.)

There’s also a strong feeling of melancholy. Without dipping into the cynicism of, say, Benjamin Black, Hill has never spared her readers, and in The Betrayal of Trust several of the plot lines are extremely sad. One character suffers motor neuron disease (what we call ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). Another has a partner with Alzheimer’s, who must be institutionalized; another is nursing a husband with Parkinson’s. It did remind me just a teeny bit of the phrase from the old hymn “Abide with me –” “Age and decay in all around I see…” Redemption? Satisfaction? The murder gets solved. That’s all we’re going to get. It’s enough.

Elizabeth George, “Believing the Lie”

Oh, Elizabeth George. Bravely facing the challenge of trying to both satisfy her readers — who, after all, want more of the same — and keep herself interested. Possibly bored by the narrow confines of the traditional procedural mystery, and, to my mind, hemmed in by the template of the handsome aristocrat moonlighting as detective…. it is honestly quite a dilemma for an author. George tried to step outside these limitations back in 2007 with What Came Before He Shot Her, the back story of Lady Helen Clyde’s murder. (Good as George is, I had never felt Helen was more than a bundle of mannerisms, and she did seem to be keeping Lynley trapped in a relationship out of a Dorothy Sayers novel.)

But we inveterate readers of murder mysteries don’t want earnest tales of social concern. We want the traditional puzzle and solution. So what’s an ambitious writer to do? George has succeeded better than most at stitching together the requisite plot, the requisite sidekick action, and stimulating forays into what we might call a novel of social criticism. Problem is, Believing the Lie, packed with all of these contents, weighs in at 624 pages. And actually, that’s just the first problem.

Morecambe Bay. Does it look ominous? 'Cos it should.

The second problem is Deborah St. James, who occupies many of those pages. Deborah’s been a secondary figure from the get-go, and not much more credible than the late Lady Helen Clyde, but as long as she was kept in the background, she couldn’t do much damage. Here, George has Deborah taking on a substantial role in the investigation and she reveals herself as immature, impulsive, and hugely irritating. Her part of the plot involves endless discussion of infertility, adoption, surrogacy and IVF that feel transplanted from the pages of an earnest specialty publication.

The overall plot concerns the death of Ian Cresswell, who drowns in Lake Windermere. (Cue tourism material, especially lengthy description of both quicksand and tidal bores in Morecambe Sands, which alert the reader early one that someone will probably stray onto said sands.) Strings are pulled at New Scotland Yard to get Lynley to investigate this death which the coroner has already deemed an accident. Because Lynley has no official standing, he has to use subterfuge to gain access to the most rudimentary information regarding Cresswell’s death.

I’m leaving out a lot. (Spoilers coming.) There’s another subplot about a hapless reporter for one of the vicious British tabloids, sent to Cumbria to dig up dirt. Still another subplot about the sad damaged children Cresswell leaves behind, and yet another one about Barbara Havers’ friend Taymullah Azhar and his elfin daughter Hadiyyah (getting a little grating, that elfin-ness). And more, still more: Lynley’s sex life! Barbara’s hair! A gay love affair and a sex change in Mexico!

Remember what your parents used to say to you when you’d done something really awful: “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed.” It’s only the people we care about who can disappoint us.

Elizabeth George, “This Body of Death”

Sometimes I wonder if the classic police-procedural style murder mystery has a future. The form has endured since, oh, let’s say the 1930s, bringing a lot of pleasure and diversion to millions of readers. Times change, and the puzzle-format mysteries of an Agatha Christie may not continue to please readers who are accustomed to more moral complexity and, arguably, more naturalism in their escape fiction. I say “arguably” because this is a highly artificial art form. As we know, the mystery begins with a disruption of order and ends with order restored. The problem is that restoration of order can seem contrived. What’s more, the pleasures of the serial involve a cast of recurring characters, but it can be difficult for a writer to work them all into a satisfying plot. Worse, if a series is successful its protagonists have to endure a freakish range of outlandish incidents in a compressed time-frame. The reader’s suspension of disbelief helps with many of these issues but the creators of this genre walk a fine line. The plot has to be plausible enough, but original; time must be spent on setting and mood; new characters must be believable and, if possible, major returning characters should be allowed to develop further. There are just a lot of balls to keep in the air.

And Elizabeth George juggles them like the pro she is. This Body of Death (not a great title, I’ll admit) takes up Thomas Lynley’s return to New Scotland Yard after the random murder of his wife. I’ve always thought George started writing this series as an updated look at Dorothy Sayers‘ Lord Peter Wimsey, and I found all the breathless aristocracy stuff very hard to take. But somewhere along the way Lynley burst out of his Jermyn Street tailoring and became almost flesh and blood, if a little too good to be true. I’m convinced George killed off his wife Helen because she was a walking cliché (titled airhead with a heart of gold). Now, widowed, Lynley is far more interesting.

For instance, in this book he can maybe get involved with Acting Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, his hard-drinking temporary boss. Maybe his close but complicated relationship with his snarky partner Barbara Havers will have to reach some clarity. And of course, he will probably be instrumental in solving this murder because he is so empathetic and such a good listener. It’s a good plot, too, very complex, involving a really inventive twist that George sets up from the get-go though you don’t necessarily see it as that. Briefly, a girl is murdered in a cemetery, a suspect is found, but a loose end in the investigation actually turns out to lead to the murderer. All very satisfying, right down to the statutory face-off between the good guys and the bad guys. There’s even a little tiny flicker of hope at the end for two subsidiary characters who ended up as collateral damage. My only complaint was a little too much local-color information on thatching (yes, as in those cute roofs), but I see that as a small price to pay for renewed optimism about the future of one of my favorite forms of entertainment.

Deborah Crombie, “Where Memories Lie”

What does it mean for the classic English procedural mystery that two of the best practitioners of the genre are American? Elizabeth George is from Huntington Beach, California and Deborah Crombie is from Texas. This makes me imagine them as longing desperately for some mist, some humidity, some lack of definition, some ambiguity — aha! England! I haven’t been to Texas but the searing flat light and surf culture of Huntington Beach are the anti-England. London is the perfect antidote.

Crombie does her research and she has a good ear — good enough to fool me, anyway. (They call it “drink-driving” in the UK: who knew?) And in contrast to the P.D. James I just finished, Where Memories Lie satisfied my appetite for character study as well providing a soundly plotted mystery. Here we get a tale involving the wartime past of Gemma’s friend Erika Rosenthal.  We also get Gemma’s mother’s illness and resulting family squabbles.  All very satisfying.

But I do start to worry about Gemma’s family and friends. The last book involved her parter Duncan Kincaid’s sister. Two back, her friend and former landlady Hazel got dragged into a murder plot. Of course this is one of the implications of a long-running mystery series. We as readers are looking for a story that is, to a certain extent, naturalistic. We want clear, literate, un-showy prose, believable characters, practically credible mysteries. Yet the genre is also remarkably artificial. Writing effective murder mysteries must be like designing tennis dresses: your parameters are very clearly defined and if you stray beyond them, you have failed. Your item (dress, book) loses its functionality. Or becomes unrecognizable.

It’s very much to Crombie’s credit that she has cranked out 12 of these books and that they continue to improve, to get more imaginative, more thoughtful, more complex. And it must be very daunting to finish book 12 and then cast your eye around your fictional landscape, looking for the next place to plant a dead body. I think the whisper of discontent I’m feeling here is caused by another unspoken convention of the genre: your detectives can — indeed, must — have these spectacularly eventful careers, one cleared case after another. (A convention, by the way, challenged by British  newcomer Susan Hill.) But maybe the ancillary characters should be left alone, to provide a respite for the protagonist? Or … no, I think this is it. By involving Gemma’s and Duncan’s  friends and families in the plots, Crombie points a little bit too emphatically to the artifice she works within. I know the great  Sayers did this first, but her books never aspired to anything beyond artifice. Gemma James washes dishes and worries about her children and gets nervous giving a dinner party. This situates her much closer to real life than was ever true for Harriet Vane. So Crombie’s utilization of the friends-and-family as central to the mystery plots is faintly jarring, it just pushes a little too hard against the verisimilitude in which her books are situated.

Barry Maitland, “No Trace”

Maitland is new to me. This is another book I bought because of its cover — note to publishers of murder mysteries, bring on the moody black and white images, relevance to plot be damned. Apparently Maitland is launched on a series involving these Scotland Yard detectives, David Brock and Kathy Kolla. Apparently also St. Martin’s/Minotaur isn’t doing much to push them, because there’s very little sales apparatus on the Amazon website — earlier books don’t even have jacket photos, there’s no Kindle edition, no review, not even reader reviews.  Pretty sad. It’s not a great book, but it’s respectable, and genre addicts need their fixes. It takes a heck of a lot longer to write these things than it does to read them, so it’s a pity the publishers don’t know how to find us. 

Respectable but not great, I have to say. I suppose the model here is Deborah Crombie or Elizabeth George, straight-up contemporary police procedural involving male DCI and female DS. Only they have no personalities. They’re utterly flat. The book is ingeniously plotted but Maitland is so cursory with the characterization that at first the narrative had a strange choppy rhythm, as we moved from consciousness to consciousness without — this is difficult to express — ever feeling grounded. I think that’s what I mean. Here’s an example: late in the book Kathy Kolla visits the Soane Museum in London to follow up on a clue. She has a conversation with a guide  in the course of which essential information is imparted. Yet the guide is described only as “an elderly, impish man” and not named. That’s an opportunity lost.  Think of the nifty pen portraits we get from writers like Crombie and George, who manage to flesh out even the most fleeting presences in their books.  

The dialogue isn’t bad, and the description of place is pretty good. Lots of moaning about Yard bureaucracy (standard for contemporary UK and Italian mysteries) which ties neatly into the plot. Plot concerns pretentious idiocy at a Shoreditch art gallery. This stuff works very, very well. Nice sardonic view of art that includes, for instance, a “piece” called “Dead Puppies” that involves just that.  Clever.