View in your browser
The Times and Sunday Times
Tuesday March 30 2021 | Issue 77
Crime Club
By Mark Sanderson
 
More than 25 titles are published on Thursday: let’s go back 30 years instead. John Grisham’s second novel, The Firm, re-issued on April 1 (Arrow, £8.99), is a reminder of just how good he used to be. “If you don’t think about death, you don’t appreciate life.” These novels were also first published in 1991: A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block (featuring Matt Scudder); Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta 2); H Is for Homicide by Sue Grafton; Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen; Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith; Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard; A Red Death by Walter Mosley (Easy Rawlins 2); Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin (Rebus 2); and my favourite Barbara Vine, King Solomon’s Carpet. Could there be a better vintage? Anyway, there’s your holiday reading sorted.
Mark Sanderson
Crime Club editor
 
 
Star pick
★ Star pick
A Comedy of Terrors by Lindsey Davis
Hodder & Stoughton, £20
Flavia Alba takes on organised crime (and her husband’s infant nephews) in a riotous mystery set in AD89. It is the feast of Saturnalia: “Few delights can match hot meats in flaky dough, with rich gravy squelching.” Not sure about the hangover cures, though: “How about crunching a fried canary or, for the really brave, a sheep’s stomach and owl’s eggs?” Dum vivimus vivamus (While we live, let us live). Favourite chapter: 67. “?” That’s all of it.

My review will appear in The Times on Saturday, but you can read it by following the link below.

And scroll down for a piece written by Lindsey Davis especially for Crime Club, considering writing as a form of escape.
Find out more >
Lindsey Davis on escapism
 
I have been escaping all my life. From men, jobs, poor commercial suppliers, I strode away smiling. Never tolerate stress. You may suffer, but "they" don’t care.

Books were important. From Biggles on, I liked drifting into a different era and “being” a different person. It was understood to be temporary. It had nothing to do with the real me: I would never be a stroppy Regency miss winning a duke; I couldn’t aspire to Hornblower. But I could join a circus, ice skate, row a skiff, ride a pony. I could be Scottish. Live on Romney Marsh. I could flee barbarian invaders and (knowing it is a long way from Venta to the mountains) find Ambrosius Aurelianus, Prince of Britain, wielding the flame of civilisation... Heck, I was Ambrosius. Perhaps sometimes I still am.

Now I am grown up (maybe) and unexpectedly providing comfort. I am proud of how many people contact me to say they are reading, or re-reading, my series: "They have made me laugh a lot and transported me away from these troubled times. I will often say to my wife and son after dinner I am off to Ancient Rome and I lock myself away dreaming up the scenes as Falco goes about his mischievous detectoring."

Easy to say that’s why an author writes — but of course I didn’t know it would ever be this serious. Was I beavering for 30 years, only for today’s pandemic misery? What if it had never started? (Saying for our times: Plagues happen.)

I always had readers who were desperately ill or caring for the dying. Number One Fan was a civil servant, the job I ran away from. Number Two once came to a book launch straight from A&E, in his scrubs. I wrote for their light-hearted enjoyment. Yes, reading was always supposed to provide a release. PD James called it "a fantasy world peopled by well-loved, familiar and reliable friends into which we can escape for our own comfort even while we know that it is a fantasy".

For me the laughs mattered. I wrote about death, but death nobody had to live with. Real death changes everything. Fictional death passes, once you close the book. Well, the maggots might linger, says Falco. If beautifully described, adds Albia. They are meant to reassure. Don’t have nightmares. It’s a story. You are safe.

Escape is such a classic theme. Oscar Wilde: "I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose." The Great Escape: timeless. Casablanca debates love and duty, yet the important characters are trying to escape fascism.

So I must keep going: giving comfort matters. "It has been said that the detective story flourishes best in an age of anxiety and pessimism, simply because we then have the greater need of the solace it offers." PD James wrote that in 1993, but, dear Phyllis, never so true.
 
Competition
 
Five signed copies of A Comedy of Terrors are up for grabs. Simply answer the question below and enter the competition here before 11.59pm on Monday April 5. The winners will be selected at random.

In which month of the Julian calendar did the feast of Saturnalia fall?
Page 99
 
Ford Madox Ford, friend of Joseph Conrad, novelist and literary critic, said: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Arbitrary, perhaps, but surprisingly accurate.

This week, a typically striking vignette from The Untameable by Guillermo Arriaga (MacLehose, £20). The screenwriter of such awe-inspiring films as Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) is a genius at making connections between far-flung people and events. He’s at it again here in an epic tale of two young men — an Inuit hunter in Canada’s far north and a man seeking vengeance for the murder of his brother in 1960s Mexico.

"I wanted to bury it inside the jar. To know it was there, still preserved, in case I wanted to dig it up and take it home to watch it bob against the glass. Chelo refused. Any possibility of bringing it back from under the ground needed to be eradicated.

We removed the foetus from the jar. The rancid smell of formaldehyde nearly made me retch. We poured the liquid down the sink and Chelo delicately cradled the embryo in her hands. She rinsed it under cold water, washing it as though it were a baby. She turned to me.

“What should we call it?” she asked me.

“I don’t even know if it’s a boy or girl,” I said.

Chelo peered between the tiny webbed legs. There was no way to determine its sex, but Chelo said confidently: “It’s a boy.” She named him Luis. I could not understand her need to give the little amphibian a name. Chelo finished washing the body, looked at it for a moment and offered it to me.

“Wrap him up.”

The feel of the skin against my fingers was strange. The viscid skin glistened in the lamplight. I looked into the tiny black dots of the eyes. I had often tried to see them as it floated in the jar. Now, for the first time, we came face to face."

(Translated by Frank Wynne & Jessie Mendez Sayer)
Picks of the week
Before the Storm by Alex Gray
Sphere, £14.99
It is 19 years since Glasgow detective William Lorimer made his debut in Never Somewhere Else, and Alex Gray’s series has more or less lived up to the geographical promise of the title. However, this time, in Lorimer’s 18th case, the head of the major incident team is joined by refugee Daniel Kohi, a Zimbabwean police inspector who recently lost his family in an arson attack. Rumours of an imminent terrorist strike in the build-up to Christmas complicate the search for a local killer. The traumatised character of Kohi adds depth to an exciting procedural. Favourite sentence: “Whit’ve ye bad wee toerags bin up tae noo?”
Find out more >
A Galway Epiphany by Ken Bruen
Head of Zeus, £18.99
It is 20 years since Jack Taylor — the ex-Garda turned private eye — made his debut in The Guards. Like his creator, he has made a career out of being unlike anyone else. His 16th case involves being hit by a truck, arson, cyberbullying, suicide and substance abuse. The welter of violence is punctuated with typographical tricks and quips, including this one from Father Malachy Brennan: “It is said that an epiphany is most likely to occur in a cemetery though it helps if you’re the mourner rather than the deceased.” Favourite sentence: “It [21 grams] is also the exact weight of a hummingbird.”
Find out more >
Look What You Made Me Do by Nikki Smith
Orion, £16.99
Novels featuring the front of a house on the cover are now so common they constitute a genre in their own right. Cue country singer Charlie Rich: “Oh, no one knows what goes on behind closed doors…” The title of this one made me laugh – “You naughty thing!” – but, alas, it’s another glum dose of domestic noir in which two sisters fall out over an inheritance. Their husbands, of course, are rotters. Favourite sentence: “A secret always finds a way to come out in the end.”
Find out more >
Downtime
 
An occasional series in which authors reveal what they like to do when not writing. This week, Peter Robinson (pictured), whose latest Superintendent Banks novel, Not Dark Yet (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), has just been published, puts down the camera and takes up meditation.

“My father was a keen and accomplished amateur photographer, and when I was young he used to take me with him on his weekend excursions. We lived in a tiny prewar back-to-back terraced house in Armley, Leeds, so any chance of escaping to the country or to an exciting new city for a day was a blessing. We didn’t have a car, but we managed to travel all over the north of England by train and bus — the Yorkshire Dales, Moors and Wolds, the east and west coasts and the Lake District, as well as cities such as York, Lancaster, Manchester and Sheffield — and on two memorable occasions even as far as London and Edinburgh, very long journeys in those days.

Most of the time, I would sit propped up against a drystone wall and read Saint or James Bond books while my father waited for the light to shine just right on his subject. But I like to think something must have rubbed off on me on those outings. Not that I’ve grasped all the technical aspects, such as aperture, focal length, shutter speeds and so on, but, however late, at least I’ve discovered an interest, and that’s a start.

Those days out also instilled in me a love of travel and, for me, travelling leads to walking, and walking leads to photography. Whether I’m walking in a rainforest, along the edge of a volcano or in the outback, there are always opportunities to take pictures. I especially love discovering cities on foot, camera in hand, from Venice and Paris to Mumbai and Maputo, and I like to think that my photographs, though not up to my father’s standards, are at least a cut above the average holiday snap.

But the pandemic and lockdown snuffed out all thoughts of travel, so I settled for my favourite activities: reading, writing, listening to music and watching movies. While music continued to sustain me, I thought lockdown might be the time to get around to War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time at last, but found myself on a steady diet of rereading old Robert B Parker Spenser novels and Bill Pronzini’s “Nameless” private eye series. Likewise with movies. Now, I thought, the time has finally come for that Fellini box set, or Kurosawa’s samurai films, but instead I found myself watching The Sinner, Call My Agent!, Peaky Blinders and The Terror. Nothing wrong with any of that, but when I got down to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, I started to worry a little bit.

I have therefore become most skilled at the art of sitting still, staring into space and doing absolutely nothing for inordinate lengths of time, something many of the eastern philosophers and gurus I embraced in my youth would no doubt have approved of. The only fly in the ointment is my new smart watch, which insists on telling me to stand up and move around every now and then. I know I could switch this function off, but somewhere, deep down inside, I know that the Watch is right. When it buzzes on my wrist and tells me to breathe, though, I must admit I can’t help but wonder: 'What next?'”
Paperbacks of the week
Three by DA Mishani, translated by Jessica Cohen
riverrun, £8.99
Three women — Orla, a divorced teacher; Emilia, a carer from Latvia; and Ella, an academic — meet the same man. Only one of them survives.
Find out more >
The Inner Darkness by Jorn Lier Horst, translated by Anne Bruce
Penguin, £8.99
A multiple murderer leads Chief Inspector Wisting a merry dance.
Find out more >
Date with Deceit by Julia Chapman
Pan, £8.99
Ah, Yorkshire! Where men are men and sheep are nervous. Home of the Brontës and James Herriot; the stamping ground of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel & Pascoe, Peter Robinson’s Banks & Cabbot — and Julia Chapman’s Samson O’Brien and Delilah Metcalfe of the Dales Detective Agency. You may not have heard of them, but the tongue-in-cheek tales of their sleuthing — this is the sixth — sell by the trolleyload. Is the local mayor playing away? Delilah goes undercover only to discover something far worse than adultery.
Find out more >
Re-issue of the week
The Little Man from Archangel by Georges Simenon, translated by Sian Reynolds
Penguin, £8.99
Georges Simenon didn’t just write novels featuring Inspector Jules Maigret. This one, first published in 1956, is the story of Jonas Milk, a secondhand-book dealer, who makes the mistake of marrying a floozie and converting to Catholicism. When she disappears — along with the most valuable stamps in his collection — he fails, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, to report her missing. A masterly study of how gossip and suspicion can destroy lives, The Little Man from Archangel proceeds with ruthless inevitability to a quietly devastating conclusion.
Find out more >
Last word
 
Congratulations (and a pain-free hangover) to Jo Nesbo (pictured): the creator of dipso detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hurler) turned 61 yesterday.

“Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.”
 
%%DC::ST Crime Club Unsubscribe v2::ST Crime Club Unsubscribe%%

This email is from a member of the News UK group. News Corp UK & Ireland Limited, with its registered office at 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF, United Kingdom is the holding company for the News UK Group and is registered in England No. 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.

To see our privacy policy, click here.