The Price of Love - review

A title like The Price of Love suggests romantic fiction, but in fact The Price of Love is simply one of the entries in a crime story collection by Peter Robinson that I’ve just listened to on an audio book. And it’s quite a dark story, too, with nothing Mills & Boon about it at all.

‘Like a Virgin’ is especially noteworthy. It fills in the gaps of DCI Alan Banks’ past life- the main events are told in flashback, and concern a seedy murder case which he investigated in his London days, before decamping to rural Yorkshire, and Eastvale. It’s a good story, although one of the key clues was startlingly easy to spot. I must say I do like the way in which short stories can expand our understanding of a character familiar from a long series of novels.

The collection is very varied, and it made for good listening. ‘Cornelius Jubb’ is set during the Second World War and deals with racial tensions, while ‘The Magic of Your Touch’ involves a supernatural element. Robinson is a very accomplished short story writer, and although - this is, I think, almost inevitable – the quality of the tales is a little uneven, overall they provide plenty of entertainment as well as sometimes provoking thought.

There was a varied cast of readers – a good idea – and it included a number of class acts, such as Neil Pearson, whose voice seems, somehow, very well suited to Robinson’s writing. I’ve enjoyed Pearson as an actor for years, and he makes an excellent reader.

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson is now one of the leading crime writers, but he certainly paid his dues. He wrote a good many novels about his series detective, Inspector Alan Banks, as well as an excellent stand-alone, Caedmon’s Song, before his talents were widely recognised. When a publisher finally got behind him, and gave his work the marketing push that had previously been lacking, his sales soared.

I started reading Peter’s books shortly after he was published for the first time. They appealed to me a good deal, because they were to some extent in the vein of the kind of story I fancied writing. Before long, I met Peter at a meeting of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association, probably getting on for twenty years ago. Although he was living in Canada at the time, he was born in Yorkshire, and his stories are mainly set in that county. Banks is based in Eastvale, which is a fictional place in the north of Yorkshire, with elements reminiscent of one or two real-life towns.

In addition to his novels, Peter is a prolific writer of short stories of high calibre. I’ve been listening to an audio version of his short story collection The Price of Love, and I’ll post about this before long. With his short fiction, he ranges widely in his settings and plots, and I suspect that, like many of us, he finds the ‘break’ offered by writing a short story or two helps to keep him fresh in between novels.

I last bumped into Peter a couple of years ago at the Harrogate Festival, at a party to celebrate 21 years of Alan Banks mysteries. It was a lively and well-attended event, and a good illustration of how a writer who keeps working hard may, after a number of years, finally hit the jackpot. Like Ian Rankin, Andrew Taylor and Ann Cleeves, he was by no means an overnight success. But like them, he richly deserves the success he has achieved on the back of a long run of soundly written and entertaining mysteries.