In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward - review

In Bitter Chill is a first novel by Sarah Ward, best known hitherto for her excellent blog Crime Pieces. The book is published by Faber, which is in itself a hallmark of quality, and I must say that I think it's a very satisfying book, judged by any standards, let alone those applicable to a debut. I should also say that Sarah is someone I've known and liked for several years, but I would not enthuse about this novel in the way that I do unless I genuinely found it to my taste.

The story is set in a fictional Derbyshire town, Bampton. Derbyshire is a wonderful county, one I know and love (I've also had the mixed blessing of supporting the county's cricket team since I was young; this has at least proved character-building, given the team's propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...) Until now, Stephen Booth, a very capable author indeed, has been the leading writer of Derbyshire crime, but Sarah's writing is in the same league. They both produce well-crafted traditional mysteries with credible police officers and good descriptions of landscape..

I'm conscious that one has to be wary of comparing one writer with another, but the other comparison that did cross my mind when reading this book was with Ann Cleeves. Ann has a gift for combing her well-plotted mysteries with sound evocation of character and place, a gift that amazingly was long under-estimated before the massive success of Vera and Shetland caused her to receive her well-deserved international acclaim.I don't expect Sarah to have to wait as long for widespread recognition. She is, like Ann, someone whose work demonstrates an understanding of human frailty, but also a good deal of compassion, a combination that is very appealing to many readers.

The plot involves a "cold case" in a cold climate. Back in 1978, two girls went missing, and only one returned. A death in the present day causes the local police to start reconsidering what happened. The kidnapping of the girls might seem reminiscent of Brady and Hindley at work, but the storyline is very different from the tragedy of the Moors Murders, though it is certainly not without bleakness. A really good read.

Mavis Doriel Hay

Mavis Doriel Hay's detective fiction seems to be making more impact now than it did on its first appearance in the 1930s. This is thanks to the British Library's very welcome decision to reprint her three long-neglected novels in their Crime Classics series. I've previously talked about The Santa Klaus Murder, and in today's post I turn my attention to the two books that preceded it, Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell. They both benefit, by the way, from nice intros by Stephen Booth, who spoke enthusiastically about them on the Forgotten Authors panel at Crimefest.

Mavis was a student at Oxford at roughly the same time as Dorothy L. Sayers, and although she was an alumna of St Hilda's, rather than Somerville, it may be that their paths crossed. Did this influence Sayers' warmly positive review of Murder Underground? I very much doubt it - Sayers was not someone who said things about books that she didn't mean, and some of her reviews of friends' work were scarily acerbic. Sayers liked "good English", and Mavis was a stylish writer - it is this that lifts her novels out of the common run of Golden Age stories, and helps to explain why the British Library have chosen to republish her books. That said, I don't rate Murder Underground as highly as her two later novels. As the title suggests, the killing of an elderly spinster takes place at a Tube station (maps are provided), and the manner of the story-telling is light and amusing. It's a pleasing period piece. The plot, and in particular the solution, are however rather slight.

Mavis created a fictional Oxford college, Persephone, plainly influence by St Hilda's, for Death on the Cherwell. Again, we have a map of the scene of the crime, and a victim who is an unlovely spinster. A group of young female students find the body of the college bursar in a canoe floating down the river - shades of the beginning of The Floating Admiral. There is a lot to enjoy in this book, and Mavis's light touch is more expertly deployed than in her debut. Again, there is a shortage of suspects (not a mistake she made in The Santa Klaus Murder, which has a dauntingly large cast) and the "surprise twist" is foreseeable. But the story is fun.

In judging this writer, and these books, I think it's important to keep in mind that she was an inexperienced novelist, and this accounts for some of the flimsiness of plot and structure. Given her fluent writing style, I think that, had she kept writing mysteries, she might have developed into a notable contributor to the genre. It was not to be - she seems to have lost interest, although she wrote non-fiction later and lived until the Seventies. But it's marvellous to see these books given a new life, in very attractive editions, and they are being very successfully marketed by the British Library. The Golden Age is in vogue at long last!

Events with Fellow Writers

This has been such a horrible “summer” so far in Britain that I had dark forebodings about a barbecue and crime event organised by the tireless Tony Higginson of Formby Books for last Thursday. Yet- miracle of miracles – the evening was sunny and I have the photos to prove it! They were taken by fellow crime writer Ron Ellis, and the photo above also shows June Francis, a prolific and successful writer of Liverpool sagas who has been a friend of mine for many years.

My fellow speakers were Stephen Booth and Frances Brody. Stephen’s Peak District series about the youngish cops Cooper and Fry has achieved a very loyal following. Frances is, in comparison, a newcomer to the scene, but her historical mysteries featuring Kate Shackleton are also making a real impact and this year she was long-listed for the CWA Dagger in the Library.

On Monday of last week, I did an event with Mike Walters at Moreton Library in Wirral. I used to live in Moreton in the 80s, and was a member of the library. This was around the time I started writing my first novel, All the Lonely People. It was fascinating to go back. And I enjoyed the gig enormously – Mike and I did it as a conversation, and although (or because?) we hadn’t planned it in detail, it seemed to go really well. Mike is an interesting writer whose latest books are written under the name Alex Walters. His earlier work is set in Mongolia, and is also well worth a look.

I rather like joint events with other writers, and over the years I’ve done a great many of them. Different pairings have different dynamics, but I honestly can’t think of any writer with whom I’ve done an event in the past with whom I wouldn’t be happy to do another in the future. I can think of a couple of cases where two fellow panel members haven’t really hit it off with each other, but even that is very unusual. Perhaps it shows that writers are more collegiate souls than their solitary occupation might suggest?

Stone Circles

There is something fascinating about ancient stone circles. One has a sense of timelessness, of sharing with people long gone and forgotten. And yesterday I visited, for the first time in more than twenty years, a stone circle in a quite lovely setting. This was Castlerigg, on the outskirts of Keswick.

I decided to celebrate my birthday by having a day’s holiday from work – and where better to spend it than in the Lakes? After the recent fine weather, the day began with drizzle, but – untypically, it has to be said – the weather improved the closer we came to the Lake District. The first stop was Windermere, a town I’ve always liked, and the second was Castlerigg.

The stone circle at Castlerigg isn’t exactly Stonehenge, but it’s quite notable and well visited. It dates back 4,500 years, which is quite a thought. I find it impossible to resist imagining what it was like all that time ago, and what mysterious rites took place in the circle, and around the gathering of stones known as the Sanctuary. The landscape of the Lakes has no doubt changed a lot in the interim – human beings have had a massive impact on it, an impact that isn’t always obvious. But I’m sure it was gorgeous 4,500 years ago, as it is today.

I’m not sure if I’m going to feature Castlerigg in either my work in progress or a future novel. I’m conscious that Stephen Booth, in his Peak District series, had a novel that featured a stone circle, Dancing with the Virgins, and I think both he and I are keen to avoid utilising similar material, though of course so much depends on how that material is presented. P.D. James featured a stone circle, for instance, in The Private Patient. One thing is for sure, a stone circle makes for a very evocative setting, and does have the potential to provide a great scene in a mystery, as well as for a stop on a day trip.

Lost River

I’ve mentioned Stephen Booth’s Lost River in the context of the amount of background information that the book contains, but there is much more to it than that. This is the tenth book in the Cooper and Fry series (although oddly, the press release says it’s the ninth – the correct figure appears on the dust wrapper) and one of the reasons I plucked it out of the voluminous pile of splendid books that I really ought to read was the evocative title, which really is made relevant to the story, in a neat and highly satisfactory manner that remains unclear until a late stage.

The opening chapter is gripping, with Ben Cooper involved in a tragic incident, when he fails to save a young girl from drowning. He becomes intrigued by her family, the Nields, and it is quickly apparent that all is not right in the Nield household. Ben is an appealing character, and the only false note is when he says to the grieving mother, ‘Be thankful that you still have your oldest child.’ This comment is relevant to the plot, but I didn’t think Ben - who is a nice guy - would say something so insensitive.

This is a good example of the way in which contemporary writers work with the conventions of traditional British crime fiction, whilst updating them. The story of the Nields alternates with Diane Fry’s journey back into her own past, a journey that takes her back to Birmingham. The first half of the book moves at a rather sedate pace, but the momentum gathers in the second half, and Diane’s quest eventually ends with her making not one but two quite shocking discoveries. To some extent, Diane’s story takes centre stage in the later part of the book, which I hadn’t expected, and it’s a good example of how a talented crime writer will confound reader expectations.

And Stephen Booth certainly is a talented writer. One of my fondest memories is of the Harrogate Festival four years ago, when I was short-listed for the Theakston’s prize for the best crime novel of the year (for The Coffin Trail.) And sitting alongside me were not only Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, but also Stephen Booth. Neither Stephen nor I won, but it was a great evening all the same, and one that lives on vividly in my memory.

Too Much Information?

A work colleague once startled me by saying that he judged a novel by how much he learned from it, in terms of information that he hadn’t previously known. He felt that he didn’t have much time to invest in reading fiction, and so he wanted an extra dividend, apart from the pleasure of the narrative. This way of looking at reading fiction had never occurred to me before, but I’ve thought of it many times since.

Lately, I’ve been reminded of it while reading a new book by Stephen Booth, Lost River. This is the latest entry in a highly successful series set in Derbyshire’s Peak District, and I shall review it another day. But what struck me very forcibly when reading it – especially the first half of the book – was how much factual information was crammed into it.

So, among many other things, I learned the name of the man who invented custard, tit-bits about Ozzy Osbourne’s early days in Birmingham, and quite a lot of information about present day computer games.

I found this interesting, partly because some of the detail was fascinating, but also because there is an authorial judgment to be made about how much trivia to include in a novel. Some writers hardly bother with it all, others take a different approach. The exact balance inevitably varies, depending on the type of story - for instance, Kate Ellis's novels, although contemporary, offer a good deal of insight into history and archaeology. In my own books, I do include quite a bit of background information (for instance, about second hand bookselling in The Serpent Pool), but I tend to be anxious about the need to keep the narrative pace going and so I restrict the supplementary material to stuff that is directly relevant to the story-line.

Judging by my colleague’s comment, though, some writers may be missing a trick. Perhaps there is an increasing demand among some readers for information as well as narrative in a novel. Is this the case? Or can there sometimes be too much information? I would be glad to learn the views of those visit this blog.

Stephen Booth and others

I recently added a number of blogs to the blogroll. They include Dorte’s excellent blog – if you haven’t read her post on the rules of feminist detective fiction, which she mentioned here in recent comments, you may be interested to check them out. Another blog well worth a look is the much-visited blog run by Kate Sutherland. I came across it by chance, via a link from John Baker’s blog. This is one of the things I like about the blogosphere – all the unexpected connections. Wandering from link to link, I sometimes feel like a child entering a vast, sometimes unfamiliar and daunting, yet nevertheless utterly entrancing world.

A third blog that I’ve only recently encountered is that of the East Midlands crime novelist Stephen Booth. Over the years, I’ve done one or two events with Stephen, and the highlight was when we were both in the short-list of six for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Prize for best crime novel of the year, at Harrogate in 2006 (The Coffin Trail was the book of mine that got me there.) Also on the short-list were Susan Hill, Lindsey Ashford, Ian Rankin and the eventual winner, Val McDermid. The last time I saw Stephen was one evening in autumn when we had a drink together in the bar of the Bouchercon hotel in Baltimore. He’s a journalist whose sales success enabled him to become a full-time novelist.

I first came across Stephen through his well regarded debut novel Black Dog and I’ve read several since then. My favourite is The Dead Place, a really excellent mystery that handles the death motif very well. I once told him that, after that book, I felt I couldn’t go ahead with a planned Lake District novel I had in mind, called The Dead Shop (after the old morgue in Appleby). And at that point, he told me he’d once contemplated a book involving a coffin trail…..

Finally, I want to mention my sadness at the passing of a notable member of the crime community, Barbara Franchi. I had the pleasure of meeting her, though all too briefly. She reviewed one or two of my books very positively, and since she was by no means a bland reviewer, I was definitely in her debt. Many others who knew her much better than me have paid warm tributes to her on the internet and elsewhere, making it clear that she will be much missed.