The most annoying sleuth

WHODUNIT Minette Walters’ new heroine is the most unlikeable in a long line, laments Jack Batten

o rule exists in crime fiction that says readers must adore a novel’s central figure. It’s comforting if the protagonist is a sympathetic figure, and the story can be more involving when the sleuth is a character in whom the reader develops a rooting interest. But none of this is absolutely necessary, and among crime writers who take the opposite approach, who make their central characters as unlikeable as possible, the bestselling English novelist Minette Walters is the leader of the pack.

“ You’re probably the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” a police inspector says to Connie Burns, the character who appears on virtually every page of Walters’ 11th and latest novel, The Devil’s Feather. If the inspector finds Burns merely annoying, he’s getting off lightly. The reader comes to regard Burns as a source of pain that is close to unbearable. On the surface, Burns offers much to admire. She works at an exciting job as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, covering events in Africa’s most dangerous dictatorships. She’s resourceful and doesn’t shrink from pushing a pompous politician or an evasive bureaucrat with tough questions. The trouble with Burns is that she treats everybody in her daily life as if they were difficult interviewees who need to be harried and insulted. Even her friends and family, the people who,

Nagainst all odds, care about Burns, find themselves on the wrong end of her sharp tongue. As a protagonist, Burns adds up to a nasty piece of work.

In this, Burns is far from alone among Minette Walters’ heroines. Walters populates all of her novels with casts of aggressively offensive characters. Hardly anybody makes agreeable company, and the central figure, usually a woman, is the least agreeable of all. “You have a cruel streak in you,” the mother of the main character in The Shape of Snakes ( 2000) accurately tells her daughter. “ You don’t mind who you hurt, just as long as you have your petty little revenges.” The mother ought to know, since she is herself a harridan with a wicked mind.

In The Echo ( 1997), it’s a male journalist who fills the role of the obnoxious personality. This guy, a magazine writer hot on the trail of an intricate murder story, specializes in sarcasm. That goes down well with the bad-tempered crowd in the book, a group that includes the journalist’s mother. Mothers are usually grim news in Walters’ books, and it’s frequently the mum who is revealed in the end to be at the root of the murderous acts.

All characters, mothers and otherwise, carry on as if the only reason for conversation is to snipe at their opposite numbers and score points. Such exchanges, though they often read like excerpts from Hansard on a day when the honourable members are in particularly foul moods, are basic to Walters’ novels because she conveys the narratives almost exclusively in dialogue. The major events — murders, assaults, rapes — take place off- stage, and it’s only in the talk that what happened sees the light of day. The result is that each book adds up to a crowded collection of long and angry conversations. Something dreadful happens to Connie Burns, the irritating foreign correspondent in The Devil’s Feather. The exact nature of the horror isn’t enunciated by Burns or anybody else until the book’s later pages, though a reader who manages to pay attention to events can figure out the terrible deed and identify the villain who put it into operation. That’s the easy part; it’s paying attention that becomes the hard part. The horrid event takes place in May 2004 in Baghdad, where Burns has been on assignment for Reuters. On the road to the airport, Burns is kidnapped. She is released three days later, not looking the worse for wear but an emotional wreck. She says she’s unable to identify her kidnapper, and dodges further grilling by fleeing Iraq and holing up in a remote Dorset village, which is where the endless palaver gets underway. Burns has difficulty eating and sleeping, and seems in a permanent state of anxiety over her three days in captivity. But her disabilities don’t stop her from being drawn into a long-running piece of social strife in the village. The point at issue touches on many sources of contention: the ownership of a valuable property, a fight over an inheritance, an old love affair and a half- hearted attempt at murder. All of the ancient events are played out in conversation, as is customary in Walters’ books; all of them, as is not necessarily customary, are incredibly tiresome.

Walters’ strong suit lies in her construction of intriguing puzzles. The Shape of Snakes, for example, presented a 20- year- old unsolved murder that the avenging central character sorted out in smart and absorbing fashion.

Nothing so diverting occurs in The Devil’s Feather. In it, Burns and a couple of rural blabbermouths talk until the marginally interesting local mysteries die of terminal ennui.

Meanwhile, Burns waits for the other shoe to drop in the Baghdad kidnapping story. It’s plain from the early pages, when Burns engages in angry encounters with a Scottish mercenary in Sierra Leone in 2002, that this crazed and vicious fellow must be connected to the crime on the road to the Baghdad airport. The explanation of his role eventually arrives, though he never appears on stage in the book’s long climax. It’s all in the chatter from the group surrounding Connie Burns, who confirms the police inspector’s description of her as the most annoying person he — or the reader — has ever met. Jack Batten’s

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