Smart and cheeky with the oddest detective character
LAST year, I read a pile of thrillers all in a row and now I can’t remember a single one. This year, I’ve read one so far and will likely never forget it. It’s an absolute one-off; smart, cheeky, with the oddest and most original detective character.
Tom Mondrian is a young police community support officer (meaning no real authority – there to provide an often false sense of security and rat out anyone who is being naughty). He also has a bullet in his brain. Mondrian has been involved in an accident and a shooting, and miraculously survived them. He can no longer read or recognise faces, but his sense of smell is not only heightened, but also linked to colour. Clues at crime scenes sound like music.
Early on in reading Head Case, I thought of neurologist Oliver Sacks and, especially, his wonderful best-seller The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
As it turns out, so did author Ross Armstrong when he wrote this fascinating detective story.
This book is much informed by Sacks’s descriptions of prosopagnosia (“face blindness”) and synesthesia, seeing colour in sounds. Some people are born this way, while others develop it from injury or illness.
Mondrian re-learns to walk (with a dragging limp) and talk again, and is put back on to the police payroll more as a PR exercise. He is teamed up with the strong, silent Emre Bartu, of Turkish origin. They are an odd couple, but eventually get along, yet Mondrian can’t recognise him from one day to the next, unless he writes down details that will trigger his feeble memory.
Their community in Tottenham is gripped by fear; there are three missing girls, a police force at odds with itself (not to mention possibly involved in the crimes), and no one expects Mondrian to do anything much except shut up and walk the cold streets.
But Mondrian has other ideas. And none of them make any sense to the orthodox ways of police detection. He has no respect for rules or authority. He is quite happy to lie and drop others into trouble, if it enables him to pursue his “weird” methodology.
He’s a difficult friend, yet Bartu gradually comes to accept, and then trust, his bizarre notions.
We know from reading Sacks’s work that the brain is a remarkably plastic organ.
It can in many ways compensate after severe trauma and, if the personality is as strong as Mondrian, learn to renegotiate the world on his own terms.
Armstrong is a London-based actor who has appeared opposite several of Britain’s biggest stars, including Ralph Fiennes. He has also acted in TV series such as
Foyle’s War, DCI Banks and Mr Selfridge. His previous, debut novel, The Watcher, became a Top 20 best-seller. This is a very unusual psychological detective story. I loved it. And hope it will become a TV series.