Grecian, Alex, The Black Country – Murder Squad 2,
Michael Joseph/Penguin Group, London, 2013
Octavo;
paperback, illustrated and embossed wrappers; 385pp. Near fine.
To
kick off this review, I have only one piece of advice for those thinking of reading
this book: Caveat Emptor!
If
that pithy piece of Latin means nothing to you, then by all means go ahead and
read Mr Grecian’s work: you probably won’t notice anything wrong with what
takes place (although you’ll probably still
feel your time has been wasted); all you other potential purchasers out there,
consider yourself warned. First, some back-story:
When
Alex Grecian’s first book The Yard
appeared, I circled around it thinking I might have a go; however, I was going
through a recurrent phase of only reading second-hand books at that point, so I
didn’t fork out the cash for it. Seeing the sequel to that work in the local
bookshop window (and yes, sadly, there is only one new bookshop for us locals)
I thought I might give it a try. Unfortunately, the store had no copies of The Yard in stock so I bought The Black Country, thinking that, if it
was good, I could always back-track and catch up on the first book when it was
next available. That will not be happening.
The
blurb and other hype-y advertising on the covers of The Black Country promise early police-procedural excitement and an
examination of the roots of forensic inquiry (it also guaranteed that I would
not be able to put it down; if, by that, they meant I would throw it across the
room in frustration, then maybe there was some credibility in these assertions).
Maybe all of this interesting material was used up in the first book because there
was nothing to match that description here. At one point in the drama, when a suspect
is accused of murder after touching a corpse which proceeds to ‘bleed’ -
following the local superstition which says that a murderer faced with his
victim will provoke such a reaction - a doctor pronounces that, not blood but
the deliquesced organs of the corpse, have been squeezed out of the victim’s
nose and mouth by compression activated by the suspect. That’s it; that’s as
much forensic detection as takes place in this novel. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Mr
Grecian is very good at describing the actions and reactions of bodies in extremis. His conveyance of the
bitter cold, the effects of disease and even the simple movement of an individual
through an icy and snowy terrain are deftly outlined and transmitted.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t personalise those feelings and sensations. His
characters are blanks, undelineated and vague, bleeding into each other and
overlapping to the point of confusion: too often one character has the same
manners and descriptors as another and you’d be forgiven for mixing-up say,
Inspector Walter Day and Dr Bernard Kingsley, Virginia and Alice Price, or Henry
the man-mountain and the enigmatic Clay. It smacks of trying to do too much.
There should be only one kindly
authority figure; only one
creepily-precocious girl-child; only one
bull-necked man-mountain. Anything else is clumsy plotting and cheap
misdirection.
Then
there are the characters whose sole purpose is simply to show up and
demonstrate a certain effect or condition. Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith (“Hammersmith”?
They couldn’t find a better English surname for this guy?) serves no real
purpose in this plot (not that anyone does) other than to find the poison in
the “groaty dick” (don’t ask) and to reveal that typhus stalks the countryside.
He shows up: we’re told that he’s irresistible to women, despite a certain
slovenliness in his appearance, and then he gets poisoned, stricken with
disease, beaten and frozen. He spends the entire novel staunchly propping his
stiff upper-lip on the sidelines. Oh, except when he’s required to do something
important like restrain a prisoner or manhandle something heavy. Come on: there
are cakes and then there’s the eating of them; one or the other. And his
so-called friends never insist that he take it easy (although they feign
concern for his condition(s) at length)!
Another
instance, and it’s a fleeting one, is Walter Day’s wife. About halfway through
the novel she shows up to give her husband a peck on the cheek and to cheer him
along. The reasons for this are obscure: perhaps she was a fan-favourite from
the first book and Grecian felt that her followers should have a glimpse of her
to keep them happy? I suspect, personally, that Day’s performance up until this
part of the book has been so amateurish and lacklustre that we need a cameo of
the pregnant wife to show that something’s weighing on his mind and is distracting
him from the better performance of his duties. Because apart from repeatedly
stating that the train will be here in two day’s time and by then everything
will have been resolved, he does woefully little in terms of detection.
Not
that I blame him: like everything else in this book, the crimes are horribly
obscure. We know that two adults have gone missing along with their youngest boy
child; we know that an eyeball, suspected of being human, has been found in a
bird’s nest; we, the readers, are told about a gun-wielding American soldier with
a horribly-mutilated face stealthily stalking one of the man-mountains for
unspecified revenge; we are shown a motley of filthy village locals acting
suspiciously, including the vicar’s wife who drops vague intimations about a
women being kept imprisoned beneath a floor somewhere. Are there victims? Is
there anything actually to discover? It’s not clear and we, the audience, are
expected to quietly absorb the oft-repeated mantra that “everything will be
revealed in two-day’s time when the train gets here”, and, like the main
players in this story, sit around doing nothing whilst nodding in smug self-satisfaction.
If this isn’t an open invitation to skip ahead to the last chapter, I don’t
know what is.
The
rest is a (somewhat literal) train ride. Things happen – bloodied clothes are
found; the local copper is shot in the head while no-one’s around; a body is
retrieved from a well – but none of it pursued, explored, taken as relevant to
the case, or even fitted together with other events. Meanwhile, there is a
plague of typhus, a blizzard descends, the village starts to subside into the
coalmines beneath it and the local inn catches fire. All of this mayhem simply
bounces the characters around in its wake before the train arrives, at which
point the killers are all dead and the case – such as it is – is solved by its own
perpetrators and abettors. It begs the question as to why the intrepid Murder
Squad even bothered to get involved in the first place?
As
a police procedural this book simply doesn’t work; but as a piece of historical
fiction it fails utterly as well. Remember Inspector Day’s supportive wife who
shows up in typhus-ridden West Bromwich with two weeks left of her pregnancy?
In what part of the Victorian era would she have even been allowed out of the
house? In what part of the Victorian era do elderly doctors use the word “okay”?
Did English governesses ever smite their foreheads in sudden realisation in
Victorian times? Where is it recorded that anyone in the Victorian age ever “snuck”
into or out of a premises? Anachronism should be absent in this type of
writing: when it appears, it pops the balloon of disbelief-suspension which the
author should be working hard to maintain.
Interestingly,
there are two interludes in the novel, where we flash back in time and space to
the American Civil War. These two scenes provide back-story for our mysterious
sniper and his target and are set in a Confederate prison camp. It is at these
moments where my willingness to believe the events came easily: Mr Grecian is
obviously at home writing in this milieu
in a way that he certainly isn’t when he’s penning narrative set in 1890s
England. His descriptions of the countryside around the dark Midlands village
are sketchy and incomplete, like a minimalist stage set for a Japanese play.
Oddly enough, his descriptions of the Andersonville prison camp are no more or
less lean, but there’s a comfortableness conveyed by the writing which is
lacking when he’s on the other side of the Pond. Write about what you know: it’s
an old chestnut in the writing game; some of us ignore it to our cost, but it’s
valuable advice.
If
you’re in the market for a good police procedural set in Victorian England, or
a book about the early days of forensic detection, look out for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate
Summerscale, or grab a copy of “From Hell”
by Alan Moore. Go the extra mile and try to find a copy of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. Any of these will give
you what you’re after. The Black Country
isn’t the equal of, or in the same class as, any of these: it is, at worst,
God-awful detective fiction; at best, boring Steampunk (without an airship in
sight!).
Two
Tentacled Horrors.
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