Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable exception, with the added bonus of being brilliantly written.
Maggie Burkhardt is an 81-year-old widow who has spent the six years since her husband’s death living in a succession of resort hotels. We now find her installed in the grandly named but slightly shabby Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor. There she has ample opportunity to indulge her favourite pastime of intruding into people’s business – the result, she assures us, of her ‘insatiable need to help others’. Identifying a couple whose marriage she decides is unsustainable, Maggie embarks on a disruptive campaign, facilitated by pilfering a maid’s pass-key that allows her to place an incriminating scarf in a bedroom where it doesn’t belong.
This chicanery coincides with the arrival of new guests – a smart young woman with her eight-year-old son in tow. The boy, Otto, is savvy well beyond his years and almost majestically malign. He soon cottons on to Maggie’s sadistic contrivances, and blackmails her into paying for an upgrade at the hotel for himself and his mother. When he increases his demands to include an XT Megabox games system, Maggie decides to turn the tables on him, but soon finds herself in a dangerous contest, as each of them works to discredit the other.
The battle manages to be both gripping and hilarious as other characters, including a gay couple Maggie befriends by the hotel swimming pool, prove unwitting accomplices in the struggle. Maggie is a wonderful creation, and the malevolent Otto is equally appealing – and appalling. I have not enjoyed the prose of any book as much in a very long time.
Charlotte Philby’s strength as a writer of spy novels lies in the novelty and depth of her characters, and this has carried over to her recent foray into more conventional detective fiction. Dirty Money (Baskerville, £16.99) features an odd but compelling duo. Ramona Chang (her adopted name, we eventually learn) is a young, London-based woman with a drug habit she is intent on kicking with the help of AA-like daily meetings. A former journalist, now in some danger from her exposé of a powerful crook, Ramona is trying to establish herself as a private investigator. The going is tough. In no position to be choosy, she finds her services engaged by a young woman who has been abused after trying to join what purports to be an upmarket escort agency supplying hard-up female students to ‘sugar daddies’.
Madeleine Farrow could not be more different. Aged 50, the daughter of a diplomat and the inheritor of a pricey flat in Marylebone, she works as a detective sergeant in the Serious Crime Investigation Department, located near Charing Cross in what is colloquially known as SCID Row. Just back from investigating a paedophile ring in Vietnam, Madeleine is assigned to tracing the money of an imprisoned Kazakhstan official as it gets laundered in London by his free-spending family. She soon finds there is more than tax-dodging to uncover, and a link emerges to Ramona and her pursuit of the dating scamster.
The connection is predictable but also credible, and smoothly made. The many London settings are vividly portrayed, ranging easily between the East and West End, from tawdry bedsits to gaudy displays in Harrods, and even an academic’s office at the LSE. The dialogue is sharp but resonant, and Philby is particularly good at portraying the complementary mindsets of her protagonists. It’s not a flawless book – sometimes the descriptive prose can seem formulaic, even laboured – but the characters and narrative pace offset the occasional stylistic hiccup. Philby has made the transition from espionage to detection with aplomb, and laid the ground for what should be an excellent series.
Crime fiction now attracts many ostensibly literary writers, and the most successful examples of this change of genre see the author bringing high calibre prose to a strong, tense plot. But in Death Takes Me (Bloomsbury, £16.99), by the acclaimed Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, the balance seems out of kilter, and the result is a frustrating, gnomic kind of read.
We begin with a brutally castrated male corpse that has been discovered by the ‘Informant’ who is then questioned by the ‘Detective’. Lines of poetry have been sprayed on the wall of the alley where the body lies. The poet, Alejandra Pizarnik, is a real writer, while the Informant is named Cristina, and is a professor, like the author.
The effect of this blurring of real identities with fictive ones is at best playful, at worst confusing, and ultimately exhausting. Identities shift between gender, names are provisional and often changed or dropped altogether, and the savagery of the serial killer is lost in a melange of poetry and descriptive prose, including a rambling rumination on prose poems. The give and take needed when a literary writer steps into thriller terrain is all take here.
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Holy City by Henry Wise (No Exit Press, £9.99) has a hero in search of a ghost-filled past. Will Seems works as a deputy sheriff in the small town where he grew up. He has been away for ten years, but unfinished business and some persisting guilt have brought him back.
When a childhood acquaintance is found stabbed to death, the father of Will’s best childhood friend is arrested for the murder. Will is certain the man is innocent, but since his boss, the town’s long-serving sheriff, is content with an easy solution to the case, Will has to work on his own to clear the accused. His efforts stir more than mere memories, and we learn why he left town and why he feels the shame that triggered his hasty departure.
This is classic Southern Gothic terrain – a land of chiffarobes and wrecked cars, of faded grandeur and present-day squalor. It is not a skein of American literature much in fashion now. But Holy City injects it with considerable new life, and there is a freshness to the prose that lifts the novel above the time-worn environs of William Faulkner and Harper Lee. Race is an issue, but a subordinate one, and never the most important feature of any character. There are many scenes of great power – and comedy: a coffin at a funeral turns out to be empty; a colleague at the factory where Will once worked is so famously lazy that it comes as a shock when he is finally fired for idleness. This is a debut that manages to use old tropes in a new way, and one looks forward to more from Henry Wise.
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