Review: Wychwood & Hallowdene

MANN, George, Wychwood, Titan Books/Titan Publishing Group Ltd., London, 2017.

Octavo; paperback; 350pp. New.

There are a number of ways to review things. You can come at them with a hypercritical point of view and simply drag something down into oblivion, or there are more upbeat approaches, where every good aspect of a piece is hyped beyond credibility. A good critic always tries to combine elements of both methods. In addition, everybody has their own personal views about things, and these will always colour their approach to critiquing a work. For me, it’s always – first and foremost – important to determine whether or not I found the piece to be entertaining, either emotionally or intellectually. There are certain types of writing which I completely avoid – fantasy writing for example – because the format is irritating to me and so I question myself as to whether I would be able to give an unbiased assessment. A critic’s evaluation must always be considered a personal opinion and never a statement of absolute fact; it’s an analysis which can be taken onboard by the reader or disregarded as they see fit. And this is how it should be.

This is an ominous way to embark upon a review of these two books, but I have a purpose here and I wanted to lay things out with some level of transparency before diving in.

There has been quite a fuss made about these two books and the reviews I was reading convinced me to give them a try. They are touted as being solid modern entries in the canon of occult detective writing and, since I am a fan of that format, I wanted to see what the noise was about. They duly arrived in the mail and I spent the next week meandering my way through them. I have to say that the hype didn’t quite live up to the reality.

If you’ve ever watched an episode of “Midsomer Murders” then you know what you’re letting yourself in for with these books. These are police procedurals set in sleepy Oxfordshire hamlets, replete with all the kinds of stock characters you’d expect to see on “Midsomer”. As you read through them you find yourself quickly spotting the red herrings and identifying who’s next to get horribly killed in some dramatic set-piece murder. I’m never good at spotting ‘whodunnit’ with this type of thing, but even I knew who the culprit was by about halfway through the first mystery, which is never a good thing.

In the first novel, journalist Elspeth “Ellie” Reeves finds herself returning home from London to her mother’s house in the quaint village of Wilsby-Under-Wychwood, after discovering her boyfriend’s infidelities and deciding to make a messy break of things. As she arrives, she sees police activity in the woods nearby and stumbles across a brutal murder scene, only to be frog-marched away by her childhood playmate and now full-grown local police officer, DS Peter Shaw. As she settles into her new situation, they learn that someone is killing local people in manners outlined by a regional myth-cycle known as the Legends of the Carrion King. It transpires that some people in the community are also being forced to commit suicide in awful ways quite distinct from the Carrion King set-pieces, but these are simply rolled into the mass-killing by the investigators despite having a quite separate modus operandi.

This is the “Midsomer” effect going full-bore here: in the real world of crime investigation, it must happen – and not infrequently – that a series of murders might take place at the same time that another series of killings is happening. Police investigators are surely trained to separate different strands of nefariousness and identify the work of different perpetrators; it surely can’t be standard practice to throw subsequent murders onto the same stack and treat them all as a single phenomenon? However, that’s what happens here, and it stretches credibility somewhat. This is either, two murderers with different MOs at work, or one psycho with two distinct ways of working which would be – prima facie – highly unlikely. Our coppers make the unlikely choice, and I was left thinking, “really?”.

I mentioned above that I dislike fantasy writing. The reason for this is that I like the world as it is (or was in the case of historical writing) and starting with a consensual understanding of reality before embarking upon the author’s narrative is how I like things to be. If I have to take on board the fact that there are Elves and Dwarves, or that the physics of the planet conform to the inside of a lava-lamp, then my eyes glaze over: I don’t like being lectured at and the world is already an interesting place, thank you very much. With crime fiction or horror writing, those forms of writing depend on a mutual knowledge of reality and how things work, otherwise, for me, there’s no point writing the stories in the first place. Adding a criminal or supernatural element into an understood world tests the author’s ability to convey that reality accurately as it reacts to these stressors; that’s what makes these types of writing interesting (to me, at least). What George Mann does here however, is overturn our understanding of reality by injecting a massive fantasy subtext into the proceedings and asking us to take it as read.

Mann tells us that the forest of Wychwood, which dominates all of the small villages in the area where his stories occur, was the birthplace of the “Carrion King” legends. This myth cycle is colourful and violent and sadly, put together from whole cloth to serve the local crimes unfolding in this novel. To this end, we are treated to long expository tracts concerning these myths and frankly, they’re dull. Again, “Midsomer” does this very thing – cite a quaint, fictitious, local legend – whenever a murder investigation tiptoes around a supernatural rationale, and it’s trite when they do it as well. If these were actual, real legends, I would have sat up and taken interest; as it was, it just left me cold. Actual local folklore is quite interesting; made-up stuff is not. I direct you to Long Lankin as a case in point.

However, this is not the supernatural element which makes this an occult detective novel. It transpires that our villain has a means of using mirrors to take control of people, with the grisly rationale of making them commit apparent suicide under villainous remote control. Our heroine sees this take place at the end of the book and is able to prevent it, but it – and the two other deaths executed in this fashion – are simply swept under the rug of the larger investigation and filed away. I couldn’t help but think that this was what the book should have been about: the Carrion King supertext should have been abandoned in favour of this far more compelling, but seemingly tacked-on, sub-plot. In the end, the cops ignore it, our heroes ignore it and we, the readers, are asked to ignore it also. Very unsatisfying.

As to the characters themselves, they were about as lacklustre as you could expect. Dialogue in this book is seen as an opportunity to dump massive amounts of expository material, and the actors are all bland and interchangeable, tricked out with tacked-on identifiers to try and differentiate them. Much popular writing these days is of this pre-chewed, easily absorbed quality and I should barely even mention it but for the fact that it, rather than the characters themselves, are what leaps off the page. If there’s any individuality to the author’s style at all, it’s, once again, a wholesale adoption of the “Midsomer Murders” format with all of its bland, by-the-book shortcomings.

In summation, was I entertained? Well, I was diverted - with the exception of having to listen to an entire mythology that was bogus and indulgent – and that was enough to tempt me to read the sequel.

MANN, George, Hallowdene, Titan Books/Titan Publishing Group Ltd., London, 2018.

Octavo; paperback; 336pp. New.

My main reason for picking this up was that the previous book left the two protagonist characters in a “will they? Won’t they?” holding pattern regarding their nascent romantic entanglement and, like a sucker, I wanted to see how that worked out. Turns out, it was just a fait accompli as the sequel opened, but I forged on regardless. I think that Mann actually wants his main characters to be as bloodless as he can possibly make them, for some heretofore indiscernible reason. The other characters in the tale make up for this, however.

This time, Mann doesn’t try to force-feed us a bunch of hokey folklore; at least, the folklore he does deliver is of a suitably local variety, not a vast swathe of Joseph Campbell-cribbing pastiche. Here, we have a large boulder being removed so that neighbourhood development can occur, a rock which – as local legend tells – marks the grave of a spooky witch of bygone ages and keeps her curse upon the village of Hallowdene at bay. Of course, there are those who say, “it’s just superstitious nonsense” and those who cry “Woe! The curse is come upon us!” and thus, shenanigans ensue.

This is a far better story than the one covered in Wychwood. It’s more compact; the characters are a little better drawn, and the story unfolds more naturally. I was sensing though, that someone might have challenged the author to play his cards closer to his chest and make the ‘big reveal’ at the end a little harder to spot. As it is, the villain of the piece is easy to identify because Mann doesn’t bring them into the spotlight at all: if you’re looking for whodunnit, in this case it’s the character with the least amount of screen-time. Because of the determined efforts to keep this person out of view, all of the other red herrings and false leads which get painstakingly constructed just fall by the wayside.

There were some weird imbalances along the way. We spent far too much time with the archaeological team, far too little with the film crew, and none at all with the café owner who was the keystone in the complex web of relationships that surrounded the Hallowdene murders (again, playing his cards too close to his chest). It felt like the author was being deliberately abstruse, and logic was buckling under the weight of it. The supernatural elements of the tale are reserved to one murder suspect being repeatedly possessed by the ghost of the dead witch in an attempt to tell the truth concerning her lynching back in the Seventeenth Century; again, this was noted in passing by the investigating characters and quietly pushed to one side during the solving of the case.

Not that I mind entirely. Splicing the supernatural into the everyday is a high-wire act and needs to be done with care, and this was handled much better than in the previous instalment. I think – personally – Mann has discovered that making one half of your occult detection dynamic duo a police officer is fraught with limitations which put serious brakes on how far you can explore occult activity in a police procedural format. Later adventures might well see DS Shaw pushed a little further into the background, perhaps.

Once again though, we’re in “Midsomer” territory and the sense of just watching a cozy British crime drama is paramount. There’re the local gentry with their hidebound and quirky demonstrations of power over the local region; the struggling and exasperated village business owners with money, time and effort invested in the local community; young and troubled youth trying to break free of societal or parental control and find their own way; and local “villains”, skating the edge of legality and firmly under the police gaze. It’s effortless; it almost writes itself. Unfortunately, since the damned show is on TV at any time you care to tune in, and since the supernatural elements of these stories are soft-pedalled almost into non-existence, it begs the question as to why Mann even bothers?

*****

There is actually a Wychwood Forest in the UK, south of Chipping Norton and west of Oxford. You can look it up on Google Maps and it certainly has an evocative and spooky atmosphere about it. Sadly, much of this moodiness is not conveyed in either of these books to any great effect. I can certainly see the inspirational qualities, but these seem to have been lost in the desire to tell a pedestrian country-house murder of the TV variety. These books are okay in their own way: they retail plots that begin and end in a mostly satisfying fashion, albeit with supernatural elements that are served poorly and which sit uncomfortably in the police-procedural context. However, if you want a really good, compelling crime story set in a place called “Wychwood” (Wychwood-under-Ashe, to be precise), you’d be better served picking up a copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy (Known as Easy to Kill in the US). That’s your best bet.