Murder mystery
I feel quite drained at the end of this working day. A lot of my time was spent dealing with the investigation into a suspicious death.
A tradesman on a remote job was taking a leak in the bush when he discovered human remains concealed beneath a pile of wood near Menzies in the northern Goldfields.
He came into our office today and provided photos of the grisly find.
Earlier, one of my staff had called me aside to say he suspected whose body it might be. Read more
The world is going mad #2
Karyn writes about a practice called “happy slapping” which happily I’ve not heard of before. She defines it this way:
Originally, the idea was to walk up to some random stranger and slap them, while friends recorded the event on their mobile phones. Hilarious, I don’t think! Whatever endorphins that act released obviously became very attractive, because it has now become de rigeur to commit acts of minor violence upon random strangers even when there is nobody there to record the event.
I hope this bizarre behaviour doesn’t travel past England’s shores in popularity but I won’t be surprised if it does, or if indeed it’s already happening in Australian cities.
At the age of 40 it’s tempting to moralise about the lack of values in today’s society. I won’t though. I’ll look for other explanations instead.
The “happy slapping” attack on Karyn’s 13-year-old son struck a chord with me because this week we reported a random act of violence in the Kalgoorlie Miner. A group of five white males bashed and kicked an elderly Aboriginal man who asked them for a cigarette outside a Boulder hotel. Read more
The Summer That Never Was
British crime writer Peter Robinson has really grown on me. I’ve just finished his 13th Inspector Banks mystery, The Summer That Never Was, and came away with a feeling of total respect for Robinson’s literary talent.
I know I expressed mixed views after my first Banks experience, In A Dry Season, but that was based mainly on what I saw then as a preoccupation with the detective’s personal life at the expense of drama and narrative.
I now consider that if I had started this series chronologically, I wouldn’t have had the same concern. Part of the appeal for me now is following the ups and downs of Banks the man.
He’s a copper with compassion. Obsessed by work, his family life suffers and this becomes a central conflict in each novel to varying degrees.
The Summer That Never Was follows two parallel but unrelated cases involving the suspicious deaths of two teenage boys.
Graham Marshall was a boyhood friend of Banks, who partly blamed himself for not reporting to police an attack he narrowly escaped. Graham’s bones are dug up from a construction site and the case is re-opened.
Banks comes to learn, with relief, that his own attacker was an escaped lunatic and couldn’t possibly have killed Graham Marshall because he was dead when the boy disappeared.
Banks helps a local detective in Peterborough, Michelle Hart, to solve the puzzle.
Meanwhile, back in his home town of Eastvale, the highly strung son of a celebrity couple went missing and his body was later found in a remote dam.
Banks plays a support role for DI Annie Cabot in solving this mystery.
What I liked about this book, compared with others in the series, was that Robinson gave readers two cases to follow, with numerous sub-plots in both of them, along with the ongoing saga of Banks the private man.
He did this with skill and aplomb.
In A Dry Season
In A Dry Season is the first novel by English/Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson that I’ve had the pleasure to read.
He has written 13 books so far in the “Inspector Banks” series, with his lead character being a tough, left-wing, intellectual policeman who consistently manages to offend his superiors.
Banks has been sidelined by the snobbish Chief Constable leading into this novel. The boss hands him a superficially hopeless case, which Banks proceeds to solve through superior skills of detection.
Set in rural Yorkshire, a village that was abandoned to flooding for a new dam in the 1950s comes to the surface during a prolonged drought. A small boy discovers a skeleton among the ruins.
Banks establishes the date of death as being around the late 1940s. He incredibly identifies the body and pieces together the jigsaw of what happened.
Along the way he has a love interest with his partner on the case, fights with his ex-wife, flirts with another woman and argues with his son.
Some of these peripheral issues I found rather distracting, especially as they had nothing to do with the murder mystery.
Robinson hops between scenes for the narration, focusing on different characters and even different time periods. This worked most of the time, except the irrelevant personal dramas.
Full credit though for the build up of suspense. Unlike some crime novels the series of coincidences were not beyond belief and the ending remained in doubt until the final pages.
An amusing aside for this reader is the possibility that Yorkshire could have a hot, dry summer. I guess everything is relative.
Kathy Reichs
Kathy Reichs is an interesting writer. Her books are first-person crime narratives written from the perspective of a forensic anthropologist, which is her “real life” occupation.
According to the author’s blurb, she is one of only 50 accredited forensic anthropologists in the United States.
She works part time for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and part-time for the equivalent agency in Montreal, Quebec.
The book’s first-person fictional character, Dr Temperance Brennan, also holds those positions.
Apparently the job’s mundane regular task is to analyse old bones that are dug up on construction sites, in the forest or wherever. She needs to determine if the bones are human and if foul play might have been involved.
Brennan, known as Temp, has a knack for getting deeply involved in her work to the point of irritating police officers.
From their point of view she’s meant to provide a scientific reference point, but Temp goes beyond the call of duty and likes to play detective. She’s pretty good at it too, which irritates some of the officers even more, especially her antagonist Luc Claudel.
What I like about Reichs are her settings and the unique scientific perspective she brings to crime fiction. I’ve read three of her books now and they’re all similar in style.
Deja Dead and Deadly Decisions are set in Montreal. Temp has learnt French and blends nicely into the culture of what must be North America’s most fascinating city, perhaps with the exception of New Orleans.
As an Australian reader I’d like to be given more of a taste for Montreal, but I also understand the author not wanting to distract from the pace of her work. The French language references and selective place descriptions are interesting enough.
Grave Secrets, the second book I read, alternates between Montreal and Guatemala. In my opinion it’s her best work. It shows a genuine empathy for her subjects, compassion for the less fortunate and a determination to make right from wrong.
Deadly Decisions didn’t work as well for me, but I still enjoyed the book. It narrates a gang war between the Hells Angels and Vipers.
It goes a little over the top and it stretches belief sometimes that Brennan and her nephew somehow manage to get themselves into particular situations.
That seems to be the biggest challenge for crime and mystery writers; maintaining credibility in the storyline. There’s no doubt it’s a skill and some do it better than others.
Kathy Reichs is relatively new to writing and will hopefully deliver many more novels in the years to come.
The scientific background she writes from is surely unique and it’s to her credit that this aspect is usually not overdone (the blood splatter analysis in Deadly Decisions an exception).
Writing in the first person makes it difficult for her to develop secondary characters, but there is scope for her to do this in future books. Claudel, in particular, could be the focus of stories in his own right.
I look forward to reading more of her work.
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