A book with a title that I will not reveal for now

Some books really are asking for it.  Take the one I'm talking about now.  No, I'm not going to tell you the title, not yet.  Not until you're ready.  But to explain.  I picked up a novel, by 'Best selling' auther JA Jance, at my local library the other day.  Two things struck me as soon as I looked at the cover.  Yes, I know.  Never judge a ... but just bear with me, okay.  Cliches are sometimes true.  This book's cover was asking for it.

The first thing wrong with it was the title.  Yes, I know, I still haven't told you what it is yet.  I'm a tease.  The second thing wrong with it was the strapline below the title, which proclaimed this book to be 'A Novel of Suspense', a high falutin' wording that vaguely echoed Conrad's line in titles (Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard).  Old Joe could do it of course; but here, proclaiming the book to be 'A Novel of Suspense' only managed to sound both pompous and wistful at the same time.  This wasn't a quote from some gushing hack, mind you.  It was a claim advanced by the novel itself.  Any book promoting itself in such a way is setting expectations that it damn well better live up to.  Paradise Lost, however, does not.

Paradise Lost?  Yes, indeed.  I kid you not.  She called her book that.  Barging fearlessly where angels fear to treat, or something like that, and appropriating a title that might - just might - have a bit of history.

And the funny thing is, it is totally irrelevant.  There's no reason for anything to be called Paradise Lost.  I guess Jance just thought it sounded kinda cool.

The story stumbles along the predictable road of far too many 'series' novels - the tiresome set ups and rehashings of previous entries in the series, the irritating supporting entourage of characters you know you are supposed to love and don't, but which the writer is too enamoured with (or arrogantly thinks her readers are) and the annoying intrusions of the character's personal life into the narrative.  Because, ya know, this ain't a detective story, it's a story about a detective and that means we have to know all about Tough-But-Sensitive Joanna Brady's romantic tribulations and her uneasy relationship with her daughter and ... and, ye gods, if I wanted a family saga I'd read one. 

Plot wise, the novel is very predictable.  The killer becomes immediately obvious applying the standard 'least important character rule'.  This may have been intentional - I'd identified the killer as a prime suspect just because of his prominent placement, then decided he was too obviously a red herring, and devised a somewhat - to my mind - alternative.  Which might be a testament to Jance's powers of misdirection, if it weren't for the crashing sense of disappointment when the killer is revealed.  Scooby Doo did this sort of thing better.

So, no.  Something was lost.  The plot?  My interest?  But not paradise.  It was a long, long way a way from where I was at.

Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes

You are probably familiar with the phenomenon. You start to read a book, and it is really good. Really, really good. You read perhaps half of it, before exhaustion forces you to stop and rest. The, when you return to the book the next day, it somehow seems to be diminished.

I don't know what might cause this phenomenon, or if it has a fancy, official name. Perhaps it is the result of tiredness, returning to the book when you're still feeling worn out from the exertions of the previous night; perhaps it's because you can have too much of a good thing, and even sugar starts to sicken after a few tablespoonfuls; or perhaps there are writers who specialise in creating riveting first halves of novels, but less skilled at finishing them off. Whatever the cause, Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes is afflicted. It started well, kept me engrossed until I eventually had to stop and rest; and, when I returned the next day, seemed so much less than it had before.

It's a tale that might have been pirated from Chandler or Hammett. Charlie Watson's brother, Leo, dies in mysterious circumstances. Charlie has a hunch more to it than the police think. Charlie decides to poke about a bit, and discovers his brother had a second life, masquerading as a private detective, and there is, indeed, more to it than the police think. Only, rather than being set in San Fransico in the 20s, it's set in modern, middleclass suburban London, and instead of a shambling PI with a bad liver and a broken heart, our hero is a DJ with a wife and a new baby.

(The Tom Waits reference is deliberate, and relevant, by the way. Read on!)

First the good. Holmes can certainly write. He's got a wry, humour style that is easy to read with out being facile. he's got an eye for observation of people's foibles, the wear and tear of relationships and the intricacies of everyday life, particularly in its intimate, sotto voce miseries and joys. Holmes is probably sick of being compared to Nick Hornby, but - bluntly - he asks for it. Charlie exudes the same geekish, near autistic degree of self-absorption as Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Charlie doesn't run a record store, but he does work as a DJ and Holmes even uses song lyrics to title the chapters. That's just asking to be tarred with the Hornby-lite brush. Still, Holmes amply demonstrates he can capture the desperation and frustration in every crappy life. And he can draw on the powers of darkness when it suits him, crafting dark and ominous scenes and loading innocuous ink on paper with menace. I don't think any parent could read the opening lines without a shiver of anticipatory horror:

She shouldn't have put the little one in the paddling pool. Not when she was so tired from night after night of 3 a.m. feeds and splintered sleep. Worse than that, she had been drinking.

Not long after, he sketches a scene where some scarily feasible young thugs run amok, egging each other on to trash a graveyard. It's the stuff of modern middle class nightmares, and well done. It seems, for a little while, that we're going headfirst down a very dark, nasty tunnel.

Then, suddenly, Holmes pulls back. Instead of the dark neo-noir nightmare we're promised, we get whimsy. We get, I dread to say, something closer to the cloying cuteness of the Mobile Library mysteries, rather than James Ellroy or David Peace. Holmes seems to recoil from the dark, silky textures he's found and prefers the lighthearted comfort of a pigs ear - in this case, the pig in question being Empress Of Blandings, the redoubtable sow described by PG Wodehouse. Instead of cynicism, bitterness and despair, we get ... silliness. Unnecessary, pointless silliness.

Take the dog. Look, the whole book hinges around Leo's efforts to find a dog. Now, that isn't a codeword for a stash of drugs or a dead body or a missing heiress. It's a dog. And the dog is called Charles Laughton. And - even worse - that isn't even a throwaway gag, it turns out to be fairly important in yoking together the two plot strands that constitute the mystery elements of the story, one of which is quite interesting, and the other, well, is about a dog.

Or there's the pointless absurdity in making the dead brother a *cough* professional Tom Waits impersonator. Now, the reason I picked this book off the shelf was because of the title. I figured any book referencing Rain Dogs in the title, and which features a brother who impersonates the great man, must have been written by a Tom Waits fanatic and would be imbued with the essence of Waits: darkness, hopeless (probably whisky fuelled) romance, bitter regret and the despair of chucking out time. Alas, no. It's entirely frivolous. Leo might as well have been a George Michael impersonator. Or an accountant. The Waits references are simply a schtick, a gizmo, a lure to people like me who are drawn to anything Waitsian.

The book is loaded with such stuff, and it wears thin pretty quick, especially because there are times - when Holmes plays it straight - that you can forgive the silliness, or convince yourself that he knows what he's doing and he'll make it all make sense in the end. So when it doesn't, and you realise that all the frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story was just frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story, you feel extra betrayed.

It's almost like Holmes had set out to write a dark urban thriller, albeit one set in the middleclass suburbs. He must have thought it would be interesting to add all these rococo elements, so he could show off his mastery as he wove magic with his unlikely ingredients. Then he chickened out, and was left with a poor farce around a double, or even triple, tragedy. Because people die in this book. Several of them. A young girl is coerced into performing in porn. Years of madness and despair are laid bare for us. There's nastiness in here, but none of it seems to mean anything at all, beyond an opportunity for Holmes to crack a few grating, smug jokes.

Rain Dogs and Love Cats could have been very good. Instead, it was just very disappointing. And its flaws were not flaws of over-arching ambition, pushing too far in the manner of David Peace; they were the flaws of cowardice, of safety seeking and the cheap laugh.

No star

White Riot by Martyn Waites

There are some good things you can say about Martyn Waites's White Riot. First of all, he's taken the title from a song by The Clash, and it's an established literary fact that any book that does so must - at least - have a good title. In fact, as he took the title of another novel from a Nick Cave song (The Mercy Seat), and another from The Pixies (Bone Machine) we can probably go as far as to say that Waites has excellent taste in music generally.

Second, he's got the cojones to take on a searing topical, controversial issue: racial and religious tensions in Britain, suicide bombers and the rise of extremism all feature in White Riot. Even better, he does it from an broadly progressive point of view, rather than opting for mere sensationalism, or pandering to prejudices. And - unlike a lot of progressives - he likes an bit of gore. No simpering middle class handwringing from the sidelines. Within the first few pages, some poor chap has had his luckless head kicked right in, and that's just the start.

But that's about it.

And, unfortunately, each of those virtues is also a weakness; and there's a more fundamental (pun intentional) problem as well. While I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time, a couple of days spent reading his book isn't. Unfortunately, he's just not that good a writer.

So, anyway, we're in the North of England. A young Pakistani man is found brutally murdered. Another dies in a botched attempt at a suicide bombing. Skinheads prowl the streets, looking for victims. The neo-fascist National Unity Party and equally dangerous Islamic counterparts square off. meanwhile, former 70s radical Trevor Whitman is receiving nasty phone calls from someone who seems to know a lot about his past. Too much.

Plot specific stuff aside, this is a novel in a serial - the title page bruits it as "A Joe Donovan thriller", a claim that leaves me somewhat cold. Joe who? Sorry, you'll have to try harder. Someone or other - I think it may have been Truffaut - suggested great titles sound familiar even the first time we hear them (which doesn't explain the very blah Jules et Jim). think The Blair Witch Project. Or White Riot. Or The Mercy Seat. The original songs, I mean, not the patchy thrillers dressed up in their finery. There's a frission of recognition even if you've never heard of them before. But "Joe Donovan" doesn't do it for me. Didn't he have some hits in the 70s? Does this explain the music obsession?

Now, I am not a fan of the modern tendency to franchises. I appreciate they have to happen - readers and writers both like to have familiar names and faces, and watch the narrative of the investigator develop over many books. We are now in the MacDonalds and Starbucks era of crime writing, however, and franchises are deliberately constructed from the start, rather than allowed to develop with at least the appearance of organic growth. Let it be remembered that old Phil Marlowe only ever appeared in a handful of novels. Sherlock Holmes cross dressed his way through a few more, and a gazillion short stories, but he didn't drag his personal problems into every one of them. Apart from his crush on Irene Adler, he didn't seem to have any issues to confront. But nowadays the characters and the issues precede the story. Perhaps, the issues preced the characters.

Anyway, this is a serial novel, and it does not wear it lightly. A good deal of time is spent refering back to the previous novel, The Mercy Seat. Joe Donovan has a son, who was abducted, and when we first meet him, he's a mess, a grief racked, obssessed mess, trying to trace his missing child. Fair enough. His fixation has lead him to disband his 'Information agency', Albion, alientating his colleagues, Peta, who bear their own scars from previous novels - Amar, literally, bears scars and is almost crippled at the start of the novel - though he seems to recover quite dramatically as the story progresses, his injuries fading into the background.

This is another thing that irks. The Albion team smack of the CSI / NCIS / House ensembles. What happened to the lone knight errant stalking the mean streets? True, the knight might have been allowed a squire for company, but now-a-days he seems to be accompanied by a whole gaggle of annoyingly 'vivid' characters, whether he stalks the mean streets of some American city, a hospital or Newcastle. Which is a problem in the limited scope of a novel, when the multiferous characters also have such riven backstories and so many personal challenges to confront, beyond the ones placed in their way by the villans of the piece - who barely get a look in for chapters at a time, so busy are Donovan and his entourage slaying their own dragons.

The entourage further complicate matters by being, well, teeth grindingly awful. They seem to have been designed as a (hem) Representative Patchwork Of Modern Britain. So, apart from Joe himelf, whose gruff exterior hides a decent and progressive soul (but who is tormented by the loss of his son and family), there's Peta, who is a tough chick in a man's world (Who is battling alcoholism and has some major family issues to confront); Amar a smart Asian techie (but who is recovering from serious injury and assessing his life. And he's gay, of course.); and Jamal, who is young, funky and black (But has a troubled past of his own). So we've got a white bloke, a white chick, an Asian man and a black kid. It's painfully obvious Waites is striving to cover all his PC, Cool Britainnia bases. But at the same time, to make these characters more than just tokenistic by ladling Troubles over them. Which simply doesn't work. And far, far, far too much of the novel (and this review) is spent watching these characters deal with thier Troubles. it's tiresome, and - ironically - this attempt to make the characters deep simply makes everything shallow. There are too many characters, they are too confronted, we don't really feel much for them. And there's a plot as well? Oh, do I have to invest in that, as well?

The plot? Well, beyond the summary above, it's pretty meat and two veg stuff. Dark Powers are stoking racial tensions to their own ends. The story relies on two massive coincidences (at least) to work. One, a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. In the other a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. You see how this works? Now, that sort of thing might be okay in the opening chapters, to get stuff moving - but the second encounter takes places in the heart of the novel. Worse, What Is Going On is pretty obvious from about the midway point. The only amusement after that is afforded by trying to second guess yourself as the plot trundles forwards, and the bad news is that there isn't actually any stunning surprise revealed in the final chapters - it really is as obvious as all that.

Which might have been quite clever in its own way, but it isn't. There was one possible twist Waites could have included. It seemed obvious to me, after I'd spotted what seemed to be the far-too-obvious possibility that turned out to be what-was-actually-going-on-all-along. But Waites eschews this possibly more interesteding twist - and, even worse, he blandly, directly mentions it, so the luckless reader isn't even left with that shred of possibility to cling to.

All these problems wouldn't matter quite so much if only Waites was a better writer. Hell, Raymond Chandler deployed some shonky plots in his novels - one of them even turned on that most nonsensical of mystery cliches, The Unrecognised Twin. But he could write, so we didn't mind. Oh, and we only had Marlowe to worry about, not a gaggle of characters all competing for our attention and emotional commitment. There's a blah, couldn't-really-be-bothered quality to the prose. The point I first thought Things Might Not Be Going Well was on page 9 - PAGE NINE - when the luckless Sooliman Patel is beaten to death. As the blows rain down, "He thought of his mother, his family. Tried to imagine their lives with out him. Their grief." No you fucking didn't, sport. When you're getting beaten to death with baseball bats studded with nails and razors, you don't lie there thinking beautiful thoughtd. You writhe on the floor, weeping and shitting yourself, gibbering and begging for the pain to stop. Then a couple of pages later, Sooliman's remains are discovered:

Marion screamed. And kept on screaming.

She was still screaming when the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later.

Over done, much? Hammer Horror called. They want their tripe back.

The whole book feels like it needed to be scoured by a vindictive editor. Apart from dubious descriptions like the above, there's some truly astonishingly bad figurative language. At one point we're told a tousled Trevor Whitman looks like "Wayne Coyne after a particularly intense Flaming Lips gig." Oh, really? I've never been to a Flaming Lips gig, intense or otherwise. I've no idea what Wayne Coyne looks like. If you're going to make pop culture references, at least make them broad enough for people to reconise (Another time, less absurdly but more blandly, he's a "Walking Gap Ad"). Nonsense like this clutters every page; it is almost like Waites decided to pad his word count by adding idiotic similes into every third paragraph.

And sometimes, the writing is simply incompetent:

Fenton, suitably chatised, shrank backwards. Natrass said nothing until he was out of earshot.

Wait a minute. How can he shrink back out of earshot, yet remain in the same room? Donovan and Natrass are not whispering surreptitiously to each other. They're talking Fenton is going to be able to hear, unless he leaves the room. Which needs to be stated.

So, as I said, I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time.

Do you think he'll be asking me round?

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

I read The Cold Six Thousand hoping to answer a question, which was whether James Ellroy was developing from the writer of breakneck but clunkily plotted pulp crime novels to something bigger. As often happens when you look to literature for answers to a question, I only got more questions. I still don't know if Ellroy is developing from something good to something great. He has developed a style of writing immediately recognisable and unintimable. He has secured himself a place in American crime writing that is unassailable. Whether he's going to move beyond that into the world of really great writing, is unclear.

My previous form: the Dudley Smith Trio (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz). American Tabloid. And now The Cold Six Thousand. Each one of these novels follows a very similar trajectory. They start brilliantly, sweep you through first half of the novel at a breakneck pace that may even leave fainthearted souls with heightened pulse rates, before reaching a conclusion that is somehow unsatisfying and questionable. Of them all, American Tabloid is the best, in that it sustains it's berserk pace to the end and its plot lacks the sense of doubt that weakened the Dudley Smith novels.

The Cold Six Thousand is a sequel to it, literally picking up just a few staggering minutes after Tabloid left off. The opening chapters are Ellroy at his brutal, electric best. Here's a sample:

1:50 p.m.
They touched down. Wayne got off first. Wayne stamped blood back into his legs.
He walked to the terminal. Schoolgirls blocked the gate. One girl cried. One girl fucked with prayer beads.
He stepped around them. He followed baggage signs. People walked past him. They looked sucker-punched.
Red eyes. Boo-hoo. Women with Kleenex.
Wayne stopped at baggage claim. Kids whizzed by. They shot cap pistols. They laughed.
A man walked up - Joe Redneck - tall and fat. He wore a Stetson. He wore big boots. he wore a mother-of-pearl .45.
"If you're sargeant Tedrow, I'm officer Maynard D. Moore of the Dalalas Police Department."
They shook hands. Moore chewed tobacco. More wore cheap cologne. A woman walked by - boo-hoo-hoo - one big red nose.
Wayne said, "What's wrong?"
Moore smiled. "Some kook shot the President."

Ellroy's style is immediately identifiable, like a (bloody) fingerprint. No-one else writes like this. It turns some people off. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you then don't read James Ellroy. The Cold Six Thousand is seven hundred pages long, and - apart from a few 'document inserts' (letters and telephone conversation transcripts) - it is all like that.

The novel picks up the story of American Tabloid immediately after that novel's culmination - the assasination of JFK. Wayne Tedrow arrives in Dallas to do a hit. At the same time, JFK is assasinated. The first part of the novel deals with the aftermath of the killing - the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, the subsequent killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby, various unpleasant actons taken by various characters to disguise The Truth - for this is conspiracy theory heaven, kids - while Tedrow botches the job he was sent to Dallas to carry out. Scene shift to Las Vagas. Howard Hughes wants to own it. The mob want to bilk Hughes. Pete Bondurant and Ward Littel - characters from American Tabloid - are involved in various dealings and operations. A lot of people get hurt. A lot of people get dead, rarely from natural causes. The first half is brilliant. Vicious, cruel, blood soaked, racist, misogynist, preposterous, but brilliant.

There are, however, problems. The first is one of scale. Ellroy decided to bookend his novel with the murders of the Kennedy brothers - JFK at one end, RFK at the other, with Martin Luther King thrown in as a 'Whack two, get one free' bonus. This means the novel is covering a period of about five years, with a long hiatus in the middle. Ellroy's compulsion to have three main characters - every book of his that I've read features three major characters - exacerbates the problem, as it means there are a lot of character hours to be filled. So he thinks about what else is going on in the 1960s, and packs his characters off to Vietnam in the novel's major mis-step. Yeah, it fills up a couple of hundred pages and a few inconvenient years in the middle. And yeah, it lets Ellroy tick off a few boxes on his list of Things That Need To Be Included In The Definitive Novel Of The 1960s - Vietnam, tick, CIA, tick, Heroin trafficking, tick - but it doesn't add to the story proper, it just kills time.

And then at the end, it is Kill Time again - MLK and RFK get bumped mighty quickly, plus a couple of other bonus deaths. It should be a stormer of an ending, but it feels a bit disappointing. The victims don't mean much within the confines of the novel - none of the main characters are emotionally invested in them, and Ellroy's attempts to convince us that Ward Littell cares, don't convince - so in the end it is just another couple of high profile tap jobs, and the main characters aren't directly involved. It leaves the conclusion feeling curiously underpowered, like you've started a race in a Ferrari, and ended it on a bicycle.

Another problem is that the novel relies heavily on coincidence at key moments. Some of this is just lazy on Ellroy's part - it is coincidence that Littel fails to spot a crucial tail, it is coincidence he sees a revealing photograph - and the feverish police work that made parts of The Big Nowhere exhilerating is replaced by vague freferences to various minions doing the hard work of actually finding and doing, for the main. The much sought Wendell Dufree isn't tracked down by vengance-ridden Wayne's detective work, but by a tip from some off-stage characters.

Even then, there is a power in Ellroy's crazy vision of America in the 1960s that's hard to resist. At the risk of sounding repetitive, Ellroy writes like no-one else, and no-one else writes like Ellroy. Every page contains almost random moments of technical brilliance. Randomly, from page 488:

Truce.
They split the Stardust. They moved into the Cavern. They bought a new TV. Barb sulked and judged. He ran the biz. He ran dope. He ran guns.
Barb worked the Cavern. Barb wore go-go gowns. Barb showed off skin-plus. Dig it: No pinholes/no bruises/no tracks.
Truce.
They lived. They made love. He travelled. Barb flew then. He knew it. Barb flew white powder air.
They lived the truce. He nailed the Shit Clause:
Barb was right - the war was fucked - we couln't win. Barb was right - they had big love - they'd stick and win. Barb was wrong - white horse had teeth- white horse bit to win.
White flag/ceasefire/truce.
He conceded points. He owed Barb. He brought her to Dallas. The truce held. The clause held. The ink ran.

There aren't many current authors who could write a passage like that. Technical experimentation is considered to be dead, rejected by readers and writers alike as Too Hard. Too Hard to write, Too Hard to read. Instead, we get anti-literary sludge about ideas and feelings, identity fiction written in comfort zone prose. But Ellroy's managed to make a lot of people read his technically demanding, anti-comfort zone, Too Hard prose - which shows that failure isn't on the part of the readers as much as the writers. There are people out there who will read stuff that stretches their ability to understand, that doesn't make it easy. For proving this, if nothing else, Ellroy's a significant writer.

Perhaps Ellroy tries to hard. Perhaps 800 pages is 300 too many. Perhaps Vietnam was too big to be worked into The Cold Six Thousand as a diversion. Perhaps it deserves its own distinct treatment by Ellroy. He isn't perfect. He might not even be great. But he is important.

The Daughters of Cain by Colin Dexter

The Daughters of Cain, by Colin Dexter, is one of the Inspector Morse series. Now, I've always had a liking for Morse, without actually having read any of the books. This was, I suspect, because the much-missed John Thaw played Morse in the TV adaptations, and John Thaw was fantastic.

Stretching that logic a bit too far for my own good, I reasoned that because Thaw played Morse, and Thaw was fantastic, there must be something inherently worthy about the books. After all, on the TV screen, Morse seemed interesting. Surely the books would prove, if not as good, at least not bad?

Not so. The Daughters of Cain is a dull, unconvincing book. It doesn't really count as a murder mystery as there is very little mystery around the murder - the title is a bit of a give away for a start. It is rather stupid, I think, to indicate the identity of the killers in the title. If Conan Doyle had named The Hound of the Baskervilles something like Stapleton's Murderous Scheme Involving a Phosperescent Hound, a similar effect would have been achieved.

Random bits of information are thrown about - one character alludes to a rape or attempted rape, but nothing more is made of it. It looks like Dexter forgot about it. There is a somewhat clever bit of 'how it was done'-ery, but as the 'who done it' and the 'why done it' had ceased to be mysterious long before that, this isn't enough to save the book. And it was only somewhat clever, as I said.

The biggest disappointment, however, was the handling of Morse. Morse, without John Thaw's brooding avuncularity, is simply an old fart. He lacks charm or charisma. Worse, Dexter seems convinced he has created a fascinating character, and makes another character fall wildly in love with Morse - even though she is a twenty something whore and he is a rather pathetic old sod. Yes, she falls in love with him, not the other way around. Sad, and unconvincing, and it blows away whatever final scraps of credibilty the story might have had.

NO STARS

From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell

Occasionally, I dip my toe in the pool of popular literature, and the strange thing is I persist in doing this, even if almost every time I do, it either gets scalded or bitten off by a pike.

My most recent exercise in toe dipping involved From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell. I worship Tom Waits, and he wrote a song called 'Potter's Field' and I though the novel might be related to it in some murky post-modernity way. And anything to do with Tom Waits must be brilliant, or so I thought.

I should have borne in mind the Rod Stewart covers of his songs, that are just naff reprises of the original. I should have been more circumspect and thought - there is glory, and then there is reflected glory, and then there is stuff that is nothing to do with anything at all glorious. You have to approach these things with caution. The part of me that continues to have faith in human nature maintained that so many people revered Cornwell that she couldn't be bad. The more cynical side thought that popularity must equal bilge. Numerous evidences could be cited in support of the second proposition, and alas, precious few in support of the former.

From Potter's Field joins the multitude, I am afraid. Cornwell is not a bad writer as such - but Potter's shows she is a poor plotter and her characters don't act or speak in a believable manner.

Her plotting is based on withoholding of a key piece of information or action. The classic example of this is The Hound Of the Baskervilles, where Conan Doyle keeps Sherlock Holmes off stage for most of the novel, and once he turns up he reveals everything in 5 minutes. All crime stories rely on withholding, to some extent. It wouldn't be much fun if the criminal admitted to the crime on page 5 - though then we might have space for a proper investigation into motive for and consequence of the crime, both of which rarely feature in crime literature, and particularly in From Potter's Field. But there is withholding that works, and then there is withholding that doesn't. In this case, it is the latter, I am afraid.

In Cornwell's case, it is the crucial plot element could have been realised at almost every point - characters talk about it early in the story, then seem to forget about it for a couple of hundred pages, until the bland and unlikable Kay Scarpetta remembers it and decides to put it into effect, at which point the plot resolves itself in a most helpful manner. This wouldn't be too awful if the narrative that filled the intervening pages was exciting enough. Dashiell Hammett deliberately withholds the identity of the killer in The Maltese Falcon until the end, to generate suspense. It doesn't matter, because the reader is caught up in the tale that he doesn't realise he is, essentially, been told a shaggy dog story. But in From Potter's Field, there is little suspense and little of interest, and because the essential action has been foregrounded and then neglected, the characters just seem slightly dumb.

NO STAR

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill

I'd previously read Singing The Sadness by Reginald Hill and though I wasn't uncritical, I generally quite liked it. I figured - charitably - that the intrusive jokiness I detected was a purposeful affectation, perhaps even a character trait. Perhaps Joey Sixsmith really did think everyone he meets looks like a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I was inclined to be charitable and was happy enough to pick up On Beulah Height, featuring 'tec team Daziell and Pascoe, which is held to be one of his better efforts.

On further investigation, I am sad to report this is not the case. The stylistic bum notes are no affectation. 'Tis ingrained, as Shakespeare had it.

On Beulah Height is a book about child murder, which is a very serious thing to write about. Hill uses the killing of children to make crap jokes. It's not that he is an atrocious writer - when he writes straight exposition he is streets ahead of Ian Rankin, for example. But he butts into his narrative with asides that are meant to be funny, with irritating regularity. It is intrusive as it disrupts the flow, and offensive, because this is a book about dreadful things.

For Agatha Christie, a bodywas simply a pretext for a smug bourgeoise type to demonstrate how clever he or she was in solving the mystery (and hence how clever Christie was for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes). She did it very well, and her murders had a innocence about them - murder was an after dinner game for adults, it was never sexual and never involved children. Christie's books were so removed from the real world that it is churlish to criticise them as exploitative and cruel. At the other end, writers like Hammett and Chandler also made murder into entertainment - but it was always something grim and nasty, carried out by depressingly real people for horribly mundane purposes.

Hill writes about the nastiness, but in a supercilious and annoying way that makes me angry. As I said earlier, he can write competently enough, though I note an irritating fondness of the exclamation mark and the elipsis, villans of punctuation best left behind with short trousers and acne. Hill over-writes to an extent that would make Iain Banks blush. Sometimes it is almost impossible to work out what he is trying to convey, he is so busy showing us how clever he thinks he is. Key scenes are ruined by throw-away jokes and snide comments.

Hill's characters seem thin and uninteresting. Characterisation is done with a sledgehammer - a character from Newcastle is not only called Geordie (fair enough, people might call him that), but his speech is littered with clunky 'Geordie-isms.' Hill also seems peturbingly concerned with his female character's sex lives - we are told a great deal about Mrs Pascoe's stupendous breasts and we meet Shirley Novello in the confessional, owning up to having shagged some bloke five times. Pascoe himself is a dull prig. Even the bloated and buccolic Dalziell is only intermittently interesting or convincing, but even his would-be gargantuan presence he is obscured by what seems to be a cast of thousands. The plot is spread thinly between a half dozen protagonists, and that is only the 'goodies.' Gone are the days of the mercurial loner stalking the mean streets in endless rain. I know that modern police work is not about one brilliant individual engaged in a philisophical quest disguised as a murder story - but if we have to spend so much time with all these folk, at least make them better company.

The books flaws don't end there, however. There is a structural weakness. The problem is that the central event of the book - the murder of a little girl - is witnessed, no by one person, but by two. One of these people immediately and conveniently lapses into a coma before they can give the game away, and the other simply bites their tongue, for no convincing reason. Hill then brings the first witness out the coma, just in time to resolve everything and paper over the holes in the plot. Worse, he used exactly the same device in Singing The Sadness - putting a crucial witness incommunicado until it becomes absolutely necessary for them to speak - because Hill can't think of any other way to sort out his stew of red herrings.

But wait - there's more. Thinking about the second plot strand of On Beulah Height, I realised that for the fifteen year old mystery to remain unsolved required YET ANOTHER character to have remained unconvincingly silent all these years. Sorry, but no, this just doesn't wash. This isn't a mystery, it is a mess. Yet it is acclaimed as a fine novel, an exemplar of the modern mystery genre. It is not.

NO STAR