Volume 11, No. 4, Winter 1995-1996
No one would confuse Brooklyn with Chattanooga, or San
Francisco with Miami. The speech of Atlanta is definitely not the
speech of Chicago. The patterns of life in the Louisiana Bayou are
not those of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. But for those in the United
States, life in England is just so... British. It is afternoon tea,
the village vicar, misty rain, elevenses, an evening at the pub, the
village fete; the stereotypes could go on and on. Although the
country's size may foster homogeneity, regional differences
nevertheless intrude.
A setting can enrich a story and a story can illuminate a setting.
The Thames becomes an active modern thoroughfare in P.D. James'
Original Sin (Knopf, 1994). Aaron Elkins uses a real hotel as
setting in Murder in the Queen's Armes (Mysterious, 1985) and
endows it with such appealing charm that the reader wants to visit.
Robert Barnard's body of work is a prolific and varied one,
replete with both wit and dark suspense. Since he now resides in
Leeds, it is not surprising that the city and the surrounding
countryside of Yorkshire should be recurring locales for his stories
Yorkshire is an area noted for its coal fields and Leeds is renowned
for its manufacture of woolens; Leeds is accessible to both the east
and west coasts of England.
Barnard admits that some of the details of his village in Fete
Fatale (Charles Scribner's, 1985) are drawn from an actual
Yorkshire town. His fictional Hexton seems almost the archetype of
the English village with its subtle code of conduct, centrality of
the vicar, community gossip, social demarcations, village fete, and
reticence with newcomers (the narrator remains a newcomer despite
living there 12 years). The town is usually favored with "drizzle or
squally showers" but the sun shines on fete day; the sun shines on
murder.
The Yorkshire town in Political Suicide (Scribner's, 1986)
is depicted as natural Tory country. The story occurs during bad
economic times and sections of town are "overpoweringly dismal." A
distinguished history stretching back to the Middle Ages has been
subsumed in industrial development.
...The Botham of today was essentially the creation of
the Industrial Revolution, and that demanding, devouring movement had
swept away all trace of earlier, quieter times.
When the local Member of Parliament dies under unusual
circumstances, there is some feeling that "it's often the really
local man who goes down best." The ballot for the special election
includes a "mixture of the aspiring, the exhibitionist and the plain
dotty." "But politics is not a sane world," and even a murder
investigation can go awry in that world.
A City of Strangers (Charles Scribner's, 1990) presents a
grim picture of a town in "not one of the most attractive parts of
Yorkshire." A run down council estate which is dominated by the
horrible, undisciplined family of obnoxious Jack Phelan abuts an
isolated row of late Victorian homes with neat gardens and
conservative residents. The geography holds the potential for
conflict which erupts when the Phelan family appears to be moving
across the street. Superintendent Mike Oddie has dealt with some of
the nefarious activities of members of the family before and relishes
the opportunity to extract responsibility. However, both sides of the
street are challenged to act within the law.
After the death of their mother in childbirth and the emotional
breakdown of their father, the Heenan children take control of
running their household in The Masters of the House
(Scribner's, 1994). The family lives in Leeds which a visitor
imagines to be "all grime and heavy industry," but the emotional
energy of the story is focused on the family home not on the city.
Barnard has created one series which features Perry Trethowan,
Superintendent of Scotland Yard. His first adventure takes him to his
ancestral home, and his bizarre family, in Northumberland (Death
by Sheer Torture, Charles Scribner's, 1981) and his second places
him guarding a princess in London (Death and the Princess,
Charles Scribner's, 1982). The Case of the Missing Bronte
(Charles Scribner's, 1983) interests Trethowan in a mystery in
Yorkshire, at first by happenstance. He is returning from a family
visit and stops because his wife loves "these small Yorkshire
villages." They meet an elderly woman with an unusual manuscript and
when she is beat up and robbed, he is called in on the case.
These stories are told in the first person so Trethowan's opinion
of his surroundings are given rather than an objective, factual one.
His initial attitude toward Leeds is not complimentary.When an
unconventional minister tells him of his call to Leeds, Trethowan's
response is "The Lord seems to call you to some rotten places."
However, some time in the city and walks through the streets change
his mind.
I changed my mind about Leeds. Briggate and the
streets around are a bit depressing, apart from the arcades, but once
off them Leeds was rather a handsome city, or the ruins of one. These
days you need X-ray eyes to see what it's been like, or a very good
historical imagination, but that's true of most big cities. I liked
the way they built confidently, massively, in those days. The Town
Hall tells you they knew Leeds was the centre of the universe.
His reaction to people in the town suggests that he believes
certain attitudes exist among them, but is open to reinterpretation.
The reputation of Yorkshire village pubs is that you
have to drink regularly there for a year before they so much as nod
good-evening to you. But like so much people say about Yorkshire,
this turned out not to be true, or not true of this pub.
In the reaction of a constable to a young black boy who helps the
victim in her garden, he hints at racial prejudice among the
inhabitants. And there appear to be many old families in Yorkshire
eager to unload family treasures, given the number of supplicants who
appear when a visiting millionaire art collector comes to town.
As Trethowan is organizing his plan of investigation, he is told
by a local police inspector that "They don't work by the rule book in
Leeds." This implies a certain lawlessness in the city, or at least a
roughness in its law enforcement climate. It is interesting that this
opinion is expressed by a Yorkshire local, not an outsider.
Trethowan does not return to Yorkshire to head an investigation,
but a protege of his, Charlie Peace, eventually makes it his
headquarters and occasionally consults him at Scotland Yard. Charlie
comes to Trethowan's attention when he is investigating a rather
seedy case in London in Bodies (Charles Scribner's, 1986).
Peace is using his tall, imposing and muscular black presence in a
bodybuilding gym. In going undercover for Trethowan and feeding him
information he finds a natural affinity for police work. As a younger
man he had come to appreciate the benefits of the police when they
arrested his abusive stepfather. Trethowan advises him on the
decision and at the conclusion of his Norwegian case, The Cherry
Blossom Corpse (Charles Scribner's, 1987) he calls on the novice
policeman to travel incognito to New York to spy on some of his
fellow airplane passengers.
After a theatrical investigation near London (Death and the
Chaste Apprentice, Charles Scribner's, 1989), Charlie Peace
transfers to the West Yorkshire Police. In A Fatal Attachment
(Scribner's, 1992) he has been with them only two months. Because of
his past contact with people "on the windy side of the law" in
London, he feels more comfortable moving to the north, "like coming
to a foreign country". There appear to be north-south prejudices in
England similar to those in the United States, as well as racial
differences.
Peace's superior is Mike Oddie from A City of Strangers.
Both of their personalities seem secondary to this story of obsession
of a woman with two young boys. Perry Trethowan tells his stories in
the first person and so imposes his personality and perspective on
the occurrences, whereas Barnard's other books place the individual
policemen in secondary roles with the fictional narratives dominating
them.
In A Hovering of Vultures (Scribner's, 1993), Peace travels
to a remote village amid "the bleak , windswept landscape" of West
Yorkshire. "Set on the brow of a hill, horribly exposed to wind and
weather, it seemed to bear its history lightly but proudly". On
walks, he takes note of "the rolling Yorkshire hills, dotted with
disused mills and clusters of houses: grand, inspiring, but hell to
walk in, he thought."
His pursuit of a forger of literary works has brought him to a
pseudo-scholarly gathering of appreciators of the writings of a local
brother and sister who had been the victims of a murder-suicide in
the early 1900's. Their lifetime work could not compete with the
other Yorkshire literary family, the Brontes, but their deaths
certainly made them sensational.
In the interaction between Mike Oddie and Peace, one is reminded
of Peace's street background (and treated to a display of Barnard's
wit):
...said Mike Oddie, ..."Maybe we should be asking 'cui
bono'?"
"And what does that mean?" asked Charlie.
"It means 'Who gets his hands on the loot?'"
"I always heard that Latin was an economical language."
"It is. Multum in parvo. 'A lot in a little.'"
"It's like being a sidekick to Lord Peter Wimsey," Charlie
complained.
Despite their differences, the two work together well and
Yorkshire is now his beat.
Charlie was getting used to Yorkshire villages. When
he had first come to live and work in Leeds and the West Yorkshire
area he had found them unsettling -- had felt an intruder there. It
was not just his colour but his London accent that had made him stand
out and feel foreign. Now he had accustomed himself to them and to
his feeling of foreignness...
In Barnard's latest book, The Bad Samaritan, Charlie Peace
investigates with his boss Mike Oddie. The vicar's wife finds herself
in the midst of a murder while also dealing with the personal crisis
of her sudden loss of faith. Her husband's parishioners seem as
scandalized by her lapse as by the violent demise of one of their
fellow churchgoers. She no longer fits her assigned role.
The gossip and judgment which spread through the congregation
characterize human nature, not only Yorkshire. After visiting a
parishioner, Peace describes the parish as a "seething mass of
ambition, dirty tricks, slander and innuendo," but he was not
surprised.
It would not have been very different in the
predominantly black parish in his native Brixton with which he was
well acquainted. His mother had fulfilled the double purpose of both
spreading and providing the subject matter for a great deal of the
gossip.
Although the drama centers on the church, the bustle of Leeds is
still in evidence.
...one had only to go into the centre of Leeds to be
assaulted by sounds of diggers, demolition trucks, high-speed drills
and chain saws, and every pub she knew had music in various degrees
of loudness in the background.
A local pizza take-out figures prominently, as does the problem of
illegal immigration. The crime takes place in Charlie Peace's back
yard and his natural interest in crime -- "people: faces, attitudes,
gestures, signs of hidden woes and hidden passions" -- is the key to
solving the crime; he must see what is under the surface.
Barnard's Yorkshire books present a combination of countryside and
city. In the Fall 1995 issue of this publication, Philip L. Scowcroft
says that Barnard presents a "sharply observed, sometimes ironic,
Yorkshire." Fete Fatale and Political Suicide are the
best representatives of his irony and as such have a lighter tone to
their stories, especially the former. Many of these books have a
grim, dark quality, notably A City of Strangers, A Fatal
Attachment and Masters of the House. It is the characters
and the situations which grant the desolate quality but the physical
setting seems to absorb the somber atmosphere.
Alarming things are happening in the west country city
of Bath (located in Wessex on Carol Harper's regional map). After
years of being ignored by mystery writers, this elegant Georgian spa
is fast becoming Britain's capital of crime. Fictional murder is now
commonplace in Bath. Private eyes jostle each other on the streets
and top cops outsmart each other at the central police station in
Manvers Street. And it has all happened in the last four years.
Last summer, Bath public library put on a display of mysteries set
in the city. As recently as 1990, the library would have been hard
pressed to find a single one. They might, perhaps, have looked at
Margot Bennet's 1952 title, The Widow of Bath, but he title is
misleading. They would have found nothing in it about the city. Nancy
Livingston's detective, Mr. Pringle, visited the city briefly in
Fatality at Bath and Wells (St. Martin's, 1987), but the
mystery developed mainly in a TV studio outside. There is a Dick
Francis novel, Rat Race (Harper, 1971), with a scene at Bath's
Lansdown racecourse. And the incomparable James Corbett, the genius
lately dusted off and introduced to a new generation of bemused
readers by William F. Deeck, had The Monster of Dagenham Hall
(Jenkins, 1935) set, characteristically, not in Dagenham, but on the
outskirts of Bath. The city features only fleetingly, but this is the
book containing such Corbett classics as "Masefield stood like a
sphinx"; "The whole thing is so fantastic as to appear incredulous";
and "There was a momentary pause, but the reply came without
hesitation."
And that was the extent of it, until recently.
Suddenly Bath is hot. It is the main setting in the following
mysteries:
Broken Star by Lizbie Brown (Constable,
1992)
Turkey Tracks by Lizbie Brown (Constable 1995)
Dressed to Kill by Margaret Duffy (Piatkus, 1994)
Corpse Candle by Margaret Duffy (Piatkus, 1995)
The Bath Detective by Christopher Lee (Sinclair-Stevenson,
1995)
Family Business by Michael Z. Lewin (Countryman/Foul Play,
1995)
The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey (Doubleday, 1991)
The Summons by Peter Lovesey (Mysterious Press, 1995)
You may choose to explore the city in the company of Lizbie
Brown's amateur sleuth, the quilt shop owner, Elizabeth Blair.
Elizabeth is a lively, sixty-something widow from Turkey Creek,
Virginia, who finds that searching for antique quilts puts her
regularly on the trail of murderers. She usually gets support from
her neighbor, private eye, Max Shepard. Broken Star and Turkey
Tracks are, I understand, the names of American quilt patterns ,
which brings a pleasing unity to the series.
Margaret Duffy, like Lizbie, has embarked on a series set in Bath.
Her private eye, Joanna Mackenzie, an ex-police detective, works out
of an office over a herbalist's shop in the city's grandest
thoroughfare, Milsom Street. In Dressed to Kill, she finds
herself investigating two bizarrely-linked murders, and the story
reaches a climax in the Roman Baths. I haven't yet caught up with the
sequel, Corpse Candle.
Christopher Lee's Inspector Leonard in The Bath Detective,
is an eccentric, tweed-suited loner wearing brown boots who roams
Bath on a bicycle on the trail of the killer of a "crusty," one of
the homeless people sometimes seen in the city centre. Lee, a retired
BBC foreign affairs correspondent, is currently completing the second
book in the series.
In Family Business, Michael Z. Lewin has added seven more
sleuths to Bath's quota by introducing a whole family who investigate
crime. Italian in origin, they are the Lunghis, familiar to readers
of Mike's short stories and now recruited to solve an intricate
mystery from their Walcot Street address. An apparently trivial
puzzle over the positioning of a bottle of washing-up liquid leads to
an unraveling of fraud and murder.
My contribution to this spate of Bath-based books has been The
Last Detective, introducing Superintendent Peter Diamond, who
resigned from the police towards the end of the book, and The
Summons, when the police service goes on its collective knees to
get him back. Bloodhounds will follow shortly (as they are trained to
do). For me, this is the first modern series I have written and I
have an enjoying it hugely.
Each if the five authors named has a series in mind, so the supply
looks like being as steady as the hot spring for which the city is
famous. The Bath Detective Trail cannot be long in coming.
Finally, a curious fact. Not one of the authors so far mentioned
actually lives in Bath. I believe the only crime writer with a Bath
address is Paula Gosling, and she has never set a book there. Yet.
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British Regional Mysteries II