Review: The Black Country

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.