MURDER AND SPIES LURK IN FOUR FINE WHODUNITS
Murder up and down the British Isles, from Scotland to Kent to Suffolk — with a covert meeting in Moscow for good measure. Charles Finch reviews four new mysteries.
THE CRIME WRITER
out of four By Jill Dawson HarperPerennial, 256 pp.
All great writers’ biographies are less interesting than their work, but Patricia Highsmith gave hers a run for its money. Born in Texas to a mother who told her daughter with a laugh that she’d drunk turpentine to try to induce a miscarriage, the author of The Talented Mr.
Ripley had two ambitions growing up: to move to Europe and to write a book. She achieved them both with panache. In The Crime Writer, it’s the 1960s and Highsmith, who was gay — her groundbreaking novel The Price of
Salt, about two female lovers, was the basis for the 2015 film Carol — is hiding out in a tiny English village, occasionally seeing her mistress. One of their clandestine meetings ends in a brutal crime. Highsmith trapped in a Highsmith novel, in other words: a good conceit. Jill Dawson’s book sticks so close to its protagonist that it can feel stifling in places. But it’s also sharp and absorbing, with brilliant, imaginative flights and a fine sensitivity to its subject’s thorny, wounded, uncanny mind.
THE LONG DROP
By Denise Mina Little, Brown, 235 pp.
Can a city be a psychopath? The chilly, chilling 1950s Glasgow of Denise Mina’s new novel at least needs a consultation. Based on real events, the book tracks Peter Manuel, who may be responsible for a series of inhumanly violent murders. Three of the victims are family members of one William Watt. But is it possible that he’s their murderer, not Manuel? The two men meet in a pub to hash that out, and as their dreamlike, drunken, darkly vivid night unfurls, answers begin to emerge. The novel’s writing is occasionally lax — authors of the universe, please stop having chimneys “belch” — and its conclusions a bit preachy, but
The Long Drop is a single-sitter, brief, unsparing, elliptical. Mina, a gifted and prolific producer of what’s sometimes called Tartan Noir, a micro-genre of exceptional bleakness, shows that she belongs alongside its finest representatives, from Ian Rankin to Val McDermid.
DEFECTORS
By Joseph Kanon Atria, 290 pp.
Joseph Kanon often writes about the aftermath of wars — that starved euphoric moment when there might just be one bullet left over, for you. In Defectors, he turns his gaze upon the Cold War, which was a war and its incipience and its aftermath all at once, giving us the story of two American brothers on opposite sides who meet again after 12 years, perhaps for the final time. Their names are Frank and Simon Weeks. Frank betrayed the CIA to the Soviet Union in 1949; now, Simon arrives in Moscow to edit Frank’s memoirs. The immediate question becomes whether Frank is capable of a second betrayal. In his smooth, tense narrative, Kanon excels in particular in his portrayal of various British and American spies (Guy Burgess, Kim Philby) in their sad, lionized, closely surveilled Russian afterlives. Imagine giving up all of life for an idea, we think! As if people didn’t still do it every day.
THE BIRDWATCHER
By William Shaw Mulholland, 330 pp.
One of Kurt Vonnegut’s many invaluable pieces of writing advice was that a novelist should start as close to the end of the story as possible. The first hundred pages of this novel are grievously dull; they’re about a police officer named William South on the southeastern coast of England, whose beachside neighbor is murdered. Nothing particular ensues. Slowly, however, author William Shaw finds his footing, and when South discovers a second body connected with his own violent childhood, the novel begins to race. What to make of such a mixed experience? I liked its discreet, thoughtful prose, and South’s hobby — “Birding had always been his one safe place” — grounds its character in his own quietness, often enough a symptom of trauma. By its theatrical but moving conclusion, The Birdwatcher has become an excellent read. Not everyone will get there.