As black as a hanging judge’s cap

For Jake Kerridge, this British writer’s latest thriller confronts truths others avoid

NOTHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED TODAY by Will Carver 296pp, Orenda, £8.99, ebook £3.79

Most crime novels, despite their ostensibly dark subject matter, offer more comfort than despair. The young British writer Will Carver is one of the few crime authors whose books, like the bleakest novels of Simenon and Highsmith, show unflinchingly that the unmasking of a murderer is always a pyrrhic victory in a world in which more mundane forms of evil are endemic to humanity, his cynicism alleviated only by a vein of humour as black as a hanging judge’s cap. Few readers will get far through Carver’s books without needing a break for a stiff drink or a soothing chapter of P G Wodehouse, but they are essential reading because they tell truths most writers shy away from to preserve their sanity and that of their readers.

Carver’s fifth novel begins with nine people – two of them are married but otherwise none has met before – meeting at Chelsea Bridge to commit suicide. There are little sketches of the lives of each member of this doomed group: the doctor who has lost faith in her vocation; the debtsaddled millennial who goes shopping on her last day alive for “something she will look great in, dead”; the couple who no longer love their children, each other or themselves.

Much of the novel is narrated by the unnamed sinister figure who has manipulated these people into committing suicide, whose numerous diatribes against our superficial culture and its effect on people’s mental health are eloquent and unarguable, even though they are twisted to psychopathic ends. There are some neat surprises in the hunt for the villain’s identity, and justice of a sort in the unmelodramatic conclusion, but this book is most memorable for its unrepentant darkness, justified by the words of its darkest character: “Seeing the worst can mean seeing the truth, seeing the beauty.”