A quintessentially English thriller
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
IF YOU like your crime novels hot, hard and bloodspattered from page one, this is not the book for you, despite it having been penned by one of the world’s leading detective-thriller writers, Peter Robinson.
This is the 21st in the DCI Alan Banks series penned over the years by Robinson. I have been told that in the past 20 books, we have been watching Banks slowly growing older, that he has been divorced, had two children and loves music of the 1960s and 1970s. He has had to solve his estranged brother’s murder and he loves his whisky.
Banks devotees will be relieved to know that all the elements of his life thus far are reflected.
It starts, of course, with a murder — that of disgraced college lecturer Gavin Miller. His body is found dumped on a railway line close to his home near the Yorkshire Dales National Park in England. He was found with £5,000 in his pocket.
His murder surprises everyone, for he is a middle-aged, seemingly gentle and very thin man. Hardly the type to warrant a violent end. But, he had lost his job four years earlier after being accused of sexual misconduct by two college students.
This virtually destroyed him and he had spent the last years before his death leading an almost hermit-like existence. Banks and his team are called in to investigate. We meet the various members, learn about their foibles, and how they relate to Banks. Along the way, there is lots of typical English village activity, with team meetings in pubs, walks across the countryside and visits to a stately home above the village. I can almost hear the sheep and smell the cider.
It is incredibly, gently British, without it being sent up at all by the author — well, of course not. Robinson was born in Yorkshire.
Banks likes to mull over his cases in his conservatory, listening to music. At one stage it is Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece from the 1970s, but he is also into the classics, and he watches movies such as American Beauty.
The murder suspects range from several individuals at the college to a woman who knew the victim in the 1970s at Essex University. Back then, it was a hotbed of political activism, the miners’ strikes to be precise. There are several references to Margaret Thatcher and the manner in which the “Iron Lady” crushed the militant unions.
I suspect there are a lot of similarities between Banks and his creator. Robinson, however, left Yorkshire to further his studies in English and creative writing at the University of Windsor in Canada, where he had the renowned, and prolific, Joyce Carol Oates, as one of his tutors.
Today, Robinson lives in Toronto and so far his literary creation has not crossed the ocean to join him. He would lose too much in translation.