Andrew Taylor | The Spectator columnists & writers

Whodunits shouldn’t be dismissed as a guilty pleasure

What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself, but on the evidence of this magisterial but wickedly entertaining book the conclusion is inescapable. As you turn the pages, the evidence mounts up. One crime writer has been considered a serious candidate for sainthood and another has been convicted of murder. Wilkie Collins simultaneously maintained two mistresses and their children but never bothered to marry either. Mary Roberts Rinehart, an early 20th-century queen of American suspense fiction, narrowly escaped being murdered by her chef because she wouldn’t promote him to butler. Agatha Christie famously engineered her own disappearance, and Dorothy L.

For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed

Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can testify, having once had the temerity to behead a cat — in a novel, I mean —and then crucify the mutilated corpse upside down on a church door. As a general rule, if you kill a domestic pet in your crime story you should expect a hostile postbag of epic proportions. But rules are meant to be broken. Which is why it’s a pleasure to find in Louise Welsh’s latest novel a stinking, maggot-swarming Jack Russell entombed in a chest with a tightly fitting lid. She’s an author whose stock-in-trade is the unexpected, which is also demonstrated by the variety of her fiction. Among her books are a historical novel about Christopher Marlowe, a chilling psychological thriller set in Berlin and a dystopian trilogy called Plague Times, based on the ridiculous premise that a hitherto unknown flu-like virus has devastated the UK.

Fiction’s most famous Rifleman returns — and it’s miraculous he’s still alive

It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most famous Rifleman is still thriving, miraculous as that may seem after his long and suicidally dangerous career. Sharpe, a foundling child from the East End of London, brings street fighting skills to the business of soldiering. He has risen slowly and painfully through the ranks, campaigning in India during the 1790s and in Spain during the Peninsular war. At the start of this book, he has just saved the day at Waterloo with a typical combination of tactical skill, reckless courage and unorthodox thinking (in this case shooting the Prince of Orange, a British ally but a disastrous general). Sharpe’s Assassin is the 22nd novel in this long-running series, which was already a success before its fortunes were boosted even further by Sean Bean and ITV.

Glasgow gangsters: 1979, by Val McDermid, reviewed

Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could be said of crime writers themselves, who work in a genre that has an inbuilt tendency to encourage repetition, often with dreary results in the long term. McDermid herself, however, has a refreshing habit of rarely treading water for long. Over the past 34 years, she’s published four very different crime series, a clutch of standalones, two books for children, a modern reworking of Northanger Abbey, and several non-fiction titles. And now comes 1979, the first in a planned five-book series set at ten-year intervals up to the present. It’s the story of Allie Burns, a young woman from a working-class Fife family who has a job as a reporter on a Glasgow tabloid.

Older and grumpier: A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin, reviewed

By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the many pleasures of the series is that Rebus ages in real time. COPD now makes climbing stairs an increasing problem, so he and his dog Brillo are in the throes of moving to a downstairs flat. DCI Siobhan Clarke, his former colleague, has turned up to lend a hand. She’s distracted by the murder of a wealthy Saudi student, who soon turns out not to be wealthy at all. Nevertheless, he had recently promised to invest £10 million in a real-estate development 250 miles from Edinburgh near the north coast of Scotland. On his first night in the new flat, Rebus is woken by a phone call from Samantha, his not-quite-estranged daughter, who happens to live near the proposed development.

Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed

Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is largely due to its central character, John Dyer, a former journalist in his late fifties, who has returned from years in South America to live in Oxford and write a book about Portugal’s accidental discovery of Brazil. With him comes his 11-year-old son, who attends the Phoenix, a posh prep school based on Oxford’s real-life Dragon School. Gradually, through a series of leisurely flashbacks, we learn that the love of Dyer’s life has died, his wife has left him, journalism has lost its soul and Brazil is going to pot. (Only at the end did I learn that The Sandpit is a sequel to an earlier novel, The Dancer Upstairs.

Let’s swap murders: Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule reviewed

It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering marriage set among the gathering shadows of Brexit. The Golden Rule is worth the wait. It opens with a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, the classic thriller in which two strangers, meeting by chance on a train, agree to murder each other’s wives. In this case, the genders are reversed, and the strangers are two women, Hannah and Jinni, who meet on the long journey from London to Cornwall. Hannah, the central character, has escaped from her working-class Cornish family via university to London. But life has turned sour. Her husband, an entitled aristocratic sprig named Jake, has left her and their young daughter Maisy for the glamorous Eve.

A choice of classic crime fiction

A guide to reading in lockdown. My involvement with crime and mystery fiction started when I was four. The first book I remember reading for myself was Hurrah for Little Noddy. As Enid Blyton aficionados will know, this is the second in the series about a self-absorbed wooden doll. It’s a thrilling tale about a massive car heist (those pesky goblins), involving a red herring, a car chase, wrongful arrest (oh poor Noddy), a stupid police officer and the intervention of a gifted amateur (Big Ears’s finest moment). Drop everything and re-read it. Much of Blyton’s prodigious output is crime fiction writ small. I have a theory that its imprint on tender minds is largely responsible for the flourishing condition of British crime fiction over the past 40-odd years.

Brexit has at least inspired John le Carré — his thriller on the subject is a cracker

Since 1903, when Erskine Childers warned of the rising tide of German militarism that preceded the first world war in The Riddle of the Sands, spy fiction has enthralled and chilled its readers by holding a cloudy mirror to the murkier corners of international politics. During the Cold War, John le Carré’s novels were hugely influential in shaping popular perceptions about the private manoeuvres behind the public antics. His books have continued to explore the dark places of the world we live in, their subject matter evolving with the headlines. Agent Running in the Field — an intentionally ambiguous title, no doubt — is le Carré’s 25th novel. The first and most important thing to say is that it’s a cracker. There was a whiff of weariness about his previous book, A Legacy of Spies, but here he writes as a man refreshed.

Light and dark | 1 August 2019

Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and 25 novels, starred in movies, directed theatre and produced his own film. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He founded a right-wing militia to defend the emperor from Marxists and, in 1970, committed ritual suicide, aged 45, after the failure of his coup to overturn the constitution. Life for Sale is one of his lesser-known achievements. Though it’s littered with corpses, it seems almost humdrum when compared with its creator’s CV. Originally written for Japanese Playboy and published in 1968, this is, I think, the first time it has appeared in English. Hanio is young, solvent and single.

Three’s a crowd | 6 June 2019

‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He and Ellen Terry, who so often played opposite him, were international celebrities. Bram Stoker was their intimate friend and associate. He managed Irving’s Lyceum Theatre for 27 years and spent much of his career in their shadow. More than 100 years after his death, however, Stoker’s name is almost certainly more widely known than theirs, solely because of his most famous creation, Dracula (who is believed to have been partly modelled on his employer). In Shadowplay, Joseph O’Connor focuses on the three-cornered relationship between Stoker and the two actors. In terms of structure, the novel purports to be a collection of diary entries, notes, transcripts and fictionalised fragments put together by Stoker near the end of his life.

The nanny’s tale

Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the 1922 Bywaters and Thompson murder case. More recently, The Crime Writer cunningly blended an English episode from the life of Patricia Highsmith with elements of one of Highsmith’s own crime novels. Now Dawson has turned to the Lucan case, which has rarely been far from the tabloid headlines since 1974. One November evening, an intruder bludgeoned to death the Lucan children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in the basement kitchen of their Belgravia home and viciously attacked Lady Lucan herself. Lord Lucan disappeared in murky circumstances and has never been found. At the inquest, he was named as Sandra Rivett’s murderer.

Goodbye to Berlin | 28 March 2019

Philip Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther novel, March Violets, was published 30 years ago. From the start, the format was a winner: take a cynical, wisecracking private eye modelled on Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade and transplant him to Nazi Germany. Metropolis is the 14th in the series and unfortunately, since the untimely death of its author last year, presumably the final instalment. Thirty years is also the rough fictional timespan of Bernie’s career. Emerging from the trenches of the first world war, he has served for 11 years as a homicide detective in Kripo (Berlin’s criminal police). He’s a tough, morally ambivalent but essentially sympathetic character. Naturally — it goes with the format — women find him remarkably attractive.

The root of all evil

The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point. The novel is Sadie Jones’s fourth, and the first to be set in the present. It’s the story of Bea and Dan, a nice young couple who are struggling to make the repayments on their mortgage. She’s a psychotherapist with an outsize social conscience; he’s a trainee estate agent who yearns to be an artist. Desperate for a break, they decide to spend their meagre savings on a three month unpaid holiday in Europe. The first stop is in Burgundy, at the rundown hotel run by Bea’s brother, Alex, who has recently returned from three months drying out in the Priory. There are snakes and rat-traps in the attic, and no guests in the seven bedrooms, which are named after the Deadly Sins.

Heavies in a new light

Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would collapse without them. Without the threatened or actual violence they so selflessly provide, the streets would not be mean and a private eye’s career would be only slightly less risky than an estate agent’s. Yet we rarely glimpse the private lives of these men (heavies are almost invariably male), or explore their hinterland of secret traumas and guilty pleasures. Alan Trotter, then, gets bonus points for originality, from his choice of title onwards: this novel is all about the muscle who supply the heavy weaponry of the criminal world. The narrator of the story is Box, an enormous but generally docile freelance gangster who is in professional partnership with a rather nastier colleague known only as _____.

The mask of death | 17 January 2019

Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory whose precise boundaries are unique for each reader. Its author, Jeff Noon, is probably best known for his intellectually adventurous science fiction (his first novel, Vurt, won the Arthur C. Clarke award) and also, to readers of The Spectator, as a crime fiction reviewer. The labels are unfairly reductive, however, since his work has never slotted neatly into genre categories. On the face of it, Slow Motion Ghosts looks as if it might buck the trend and be Noon’s first straight crime novel (if such a thing exists). Set in 1981, in the aftermath of the Brixton riots, the plot centres on the ritual murder of a young musician named Brendan Clarke.

Kidnapped by Kett

Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as a historical crime novel. C.J. Sansom’s ‘Shardlake’ series, of which this is the seventh episode, deals with the activities of a hunchbacked lawyer in the 1530s and 1540s. The bloated old king is now dead, and his son, Edward VI, a minor, rules through the Lord Protector, his uncle Somerset. England is in a parlous state — verging on bankruptcy after a disastrous Scottish war, uneasy with the new regime’s ultra-Protestant policies and on the brink of civil unrest. Shardlake has somehow managed to cling to his integrity, despite having some dangerously high-profile clients. Among the latter is the Lady Elizabeth, the 15-year-old daughter of Henry VIII’s disgraced queen Anne Boleyn.

A meditation on history

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon makes it clear that it has several. It’s about the shifting nature of history and the mysterious footprints of the past in the present. It’s also concerned with the myriad and biased interpretations that we place on past events. Another preoccupation is the ambiguities of spoken and written French. Modern Paris, the novel’s main setting, allows Sebastian Faulks to explore his themes through two main viewpoints. There’s Tariq, a precociously self-aware 18-year-old Moroccan from a middle-class family in Tangier, who comes to Paris in search of himself, his mother’s French family and an obliging woman who will help him lose his virginity.

A play on the Scottish play

It must have seemed a good idea to someone: commissioning a range of well-known novelists to ‘reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for a 21st-century audience’. The first six novels have come from irreproachably literary authors of the calibre of Jeanette Winterson (The Winter’s Tale) and Margaret Atwood (The Tempest). Now, however, we have something a little different: Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian crime writer, has recast Macbeth as a thriller, allegedly set in 1970, though this timeframe should not be taken too literally. The plot is very loosely connected with Shakespeare’s. The location is a crumbling city in a dystopian country where many of the names have a Scottish ring. Prostitution, gambling and above all the drug trade are now the only industries that flourish in this decaying town.

Corpses, clues and Kiwis

Publishing loves a brand. Few authors of fiction create characters who reach this semi-divine status, but when they do, even death cannot part them from their fortunate publishers. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Bertie Wooster and James Bond are among those who have survived their creators’ deaths, thanks to the assistance of living authors. Now Roderick Alleyn, the ineffably posh Scotland Yard detective created by Dame Ngaio Marsh, returns for a posthumous outing with the help of Stella Duffy, herself a distinguished crime writer. It’s an inspired pairing — Duffy, like Marsh, is a New Zealander with a professional interest in the theatre. Marsh’s direct contribution to the book was small but significant: she had written three short chapters and made some sketchy notes on how the story might develop before she abandoned the project.

Riddles wrapped in a mystery

His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students can only dream of. A psychological crime novel set in 19th-century Scotland, it became a surprise bestseller — and it was also shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. It is not an easy act to follow. Perhaps wisely, Burnet has chosen to make his next novel, his third, very different in both setting and tone. The A35 in question runs through north-eastern France between Strasbourg and Basel. One evening, at some point in the 1970s, a wealthy lawyer named Bertrand Barthelme is killed when his Mercedes goes off the road as he is driving home to the town of Saint-Louis. The death seems accidental.

Apostle of gloom

Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of the grim and darkly fascinating Wallander series of Swedish crime novels, though he also produced a formidable body of other novels, as well as plays, screenplays and children’s books, before his death in 2015. After the Fire is his last book, now published in an admirably smooth English translation. It reprises the main setting and many of the characters of an earlier book, Italian Shoes, including the narrator. Fredrik is a former surgeon whose medical career was destroyed after he botched an operation. Now nudging 70, he lives alone on a bleak island in the Stockholm archipelago. The novel opens one autumn night when he wakes to find his house on fire.

A blast from the past

If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of doing, then John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is probably the one to go for. Published in 1963, and set within the comfortably binary framework of the Cold War, it combined moral ambiguity and an air of grim authenticity with a steady narrative pull. It also had an unforced literary distinction that made it impossible to dismiss as ‘mere’ genre fiction. Now, over half a century later, le Carré’s latest novel returns to this murky episode and proceeds to make it even more complicated and harrowing than it was before. Set in or around the present, A Legacy of Spies focuses on Peter Guillam, formerly the professional sexpot of Covert Operations and a loyal sidekick of the legendary spymaster George Smiley.

Escapism for boys

Jack Higgins’s writing routine was said to start with dinner at his favourite Italian restaurant in Jersey, followed by writing through the night until dawn, when he rounded off the working day with a glass of champagne and bacon and eggs. With his estimated lifetime sales of 250 million copies, his routine seemed to work. Len Deighton, on the other hand, takes a more austere view of his craft, arguing that the biggest dangers for a writer are alcohol and praise. He has a weakness for writers’ gadgets, though — in 1968, he leased an IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter weighing 200lbs. The front window of his house had be to removed in order to deliver it. That’s true dedication. Mike Ripley sprinkles the anecdotes through his account of the postwar British thriller with a generous hand.

In the thieves’ den

‘To get a confession from a proud male factor, it is always better to call for a poet than a priest.’ These are the wise words of William Archer, the narrator of part of The Fatal Tree and the notional editor of the rest. Mind you, he’s biased: he aspires to be a poet, though he is at best a ‘garreteer’, one of the Grub Street hacks who provide better writers than themselves with lurid copy about the early Georgian underworld they live in. Archer’s world is the ‘Hundreds of Drury’, the streets and alleys around Drury Lane where the thieves, prostitutes and con men ply their trades. Known as Romeville in the thieves’ cant that colours so much of this novel, it holds up a dark mirror to the great metropolis around it.

In hot water

It’s good to be back in Spook Street, home of the nation’s secret service. From a handful of locations across London, its dedicated employees struggle ceaselessly against the nation’s enemies, when not otherwise engaged in scratching each other’s backs or scratching each other’s eyes out. Spook Street is Mick Herron’s fourth novel in the series, and like its predecessors its focus is the activities of the ‘slow horses’, the Service’s rejects. Their records irredeemably blotted by past transgressions, these men and women have been despatched to Slough House, a small but hideous office block near the Barbican, where they are condemned to spend the rest of their careers engaged on the sort of tasks that Kafka might have invented for Sisyphus.

A cold case from the Cold War

It is a chastening thought that Boris Johnson’s responsibilities now include MI6. Alan Judd’s latest novel is particularly interesting about the relationship between our intelligence services on the one hand and our politicians (and their special advisers) on the other. Deep Blue is the fourth of his spy novels to have Charles Thoroughgood as its central character. (Charles also appears in Judd’s very first novel, A Breed of Heroes, but as a young army officer in Northern Ireland rather than as a spy.) He is now running MI6, a thankless job, particularly as the service is fighting for funds and (worst of all) cast out of central London to an office in Croydon. He’s growing old, too, an analogue spy in a digital world.

Where there’s a will...

‘Clonakilty, God help us,’ my Irish mother would say automatically when we drove into the town, in pious remembrance of those who had died there during the famine. Clonakilty acquires another corpse in Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah’s second novel to feature Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, which is set mainly in a country house nearby. The continuing success of the Christie brand is one of the marvels of the modern entertainment industry. Estimates of her global book sales start at two billion. Only last August, the BBC announced that it had commissioned seven new Christie adaptations over the next four years. So it’s scarcely surprising that Agatha Christie Ltd and her publisher should want to exploit the potential of the lucrative market for continuations and sequels.

Good clean fun | 7 July 2016

The Detection Club is rather like the House of Lords of British crime writing, though considerably more select. (I should declare an interest: I’m a member of the club, so it’s possible I may be biased.) Founded in 1930 by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers among others, the club chooses new members by secret ballot. Candidates undergo an initiation ritual involving black candles, a billowing red robe originally designed for G.K. Chesterton, a terrifying sacred oath and a skull called Eric. (Forensic examination has demonstrated that Eric belonged to a female.) The story of the club’s early years has been well told in The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, the current president. The so-called ‘rules’ of detective fiction, Ronald Knox’s ‘Decalogue’, were never taken seriously by members.

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