If music be the food of death ...
A 1970s murdering muso fails to convince Jeff Robson
Garish clothes, terrible food and not the greatest music in rock’n’roll history – on the face of it, mid-70s Britain might not seem the best place to set a hard-boiled murder mystery
– a genre that normally comes with a cool, downbeat and preferably monochrome background.
But, like the has-been musician at the centre of his latest thriller, Andrew Martin prefers not to follow the conventional route. His previous novels have delved into the worlds of Victorian mind-readers, 18th-century silhouette portrait artists and the Edwardian railway police.
And the summer of 1976 – when the record heatwave drove everyone out on to the streets of London and punk rock brought a blast of raw, edgy energy to the world of flares and prog rock – proves fertile territory for creating an atmosphere of sweaty
unease and misanthropic menace.
This is embodied by Lee Jones, former lead singer and songwriter of Picture Show, who had their moment at the start of the decade but have since split up and faded into obscurity.
Rich from inherited wealth, bored and psychopathic, Lee’s new “project” is a series of murders, in which he gains the victim’s attention with the wink that was his “trademark” for attracting the attention of fans who took his fancy. The aim, as he tells an imaginary interviewer/acolyte, is to create a Situation of the type outlined by the French philosopher Guy Debord, disrupting “the mass entertainments and distractions of society” and achieving fame anew.
As he begins his task, London is gripped by paranoia and conflicting theories about the killer. But Charles Underhill, a Paris-based expat, sees a disturbing link in the reports to his time at Oxford in the 1950s, when a gay tryst following a drunken game of “wink murder” at a party led to the events which forced him to flee the country. A series of mystery communications convinces him that someone knows his secret, so he decamps to Nice and enlists the help of Howard Miller, a detective novelist seeking inspiration for his next book, to do some amateur sleuthing.
Elements of classic noir abound, while the narcissistic amorality of the central characters and exotic locations recall The Talented Mr Ripley.
The period detail is convincing, but somewhat lathered on. And the trouble with the constant references to Hemingway, Chandler, Hammett et al is that the work which invokes them suffers by comparison. There is little suspense in the playing out of Lee’s “project”, his connection with Charles turns out to be quite
predictable and his victims are dispatched with an oblique matter-offactness which leaves an unpleasant taste.
The climax generates a fair degree of tension and there are some witty barbs at the earnest muso world, but despite its sweltering settings, this is a novel that, in trying too hard to be cool, simply comes across as cold.