Murder

Peter Ho Davies’s second novel, The Fortunes, is a beautifully crafted study, in four parts, of the history of the Chinese in America. Though it deals, of necessity, with racism in all its insidious forms, it does so with humanity, humour, self-deprecation and a hefty dose of irony. Each section — ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Jade’ and ‘Pearl’ — covers a separate period in Chinese-American history. ‘Gold’ follows Ling, a half-white upwardly mobile immigrant, who arrives before the Civil War, starting as a laundryman and progressing to become the valet of one of the four big barons of the Central Pacific Railroad.

The Schooldays of Jesus is not, as it happens, about the schooldays of Jesus. It is the Man Booker-nominated sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (which, you guessed it, did not once refer to the childhood of Jesus either). J.M. Coetzee is now so much part of the literary pantheon, so liable to be rewarded by the critical classes and the academic industry surrounding him, that he no longer needs to worry about basics such as having a title that makes sense. He should still worry, one feels, about telling a story worth following. Like its predecessor, his new novel is set in a nameless Spanish-speaking province; a Kafkaesque, ‘featureless’ and ‘dreary’ place.

Cher Hughes loved the beauty, the white sand beaches and sun-kissed climate of the tropical islands of Bocas del Toro in Panama. So she sold her thriving sign business in Florida and spent the profits on creating a new life on the Caribbean archipelago. She and her husband built a beautiful home filled with fine furnishings on Darklands, a private island with coconut palm trees and a sheltered cove, while investing in a couple of rental units nearby. Hughes threw herself into her new life. She went into the jungle to find strange blooms for her vases and searched for armadillos in the moonlight. A blonde in her forties, she became a popular member of the largely American community of about 2,000 expats.

‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking.’ Life is always cheap in noir fiction — but it takes it that step further when the protagonist’s homicidal impulses extend to himself. The hero of this fast-moving, agreeably violent and perfectly pared-down novella is Joe, a former FBI agent and marine who has reduced what remains of his life to a sliver of deadly purpose. After a gruesome incident in his past, ‘his limit for trauma, a very high limit, had been reached’ and he went completely off his onion.

With the current political saga running in our heads, trumping all other stories, it has been hard to concentrate on the bedside book over the last few weeks. When, in this true Victorian murder mystery, I came to the sentence, ‘Ebeneezer Pook, however, had no intention of succumbing to the crowd’s pressure’, all I could see in my head was Jeremy Corbyn emerging from his house, ducking under the prickly rosebush and refusing to stand down. And when I came to this complicated passage: Mrs Thomas’s story buttressed the account that William Sparshott had given and would dovetail with the account Olivia Cavell was about to give.

Pascal Garnier’s novella Too Close to the Edge (Gallic, £7.99, translated by Emily Boyce) deals with the boredom of middle age and how passion and violence can take on the guise of salvation. Éliette has moved to the French countryside following her husband’s death. She seeks an ‘atom of madness to stop herself sliding into reason’, and finds it in the form of Étienne, a man who helps her when her car breaks down. She invites him into her lonely home, and her life. When her neighbour’s son is killed in a road accident, it becomes obvious that her new lover is linked to this tragedy in some way, and yet Éliette reacts strangely: she welcomes the criminal behaviour, and in fact becomes criminalised herself.

Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially increased by film versions of her Ripley novels and, most recently, Carol (an adaptation of The Price of Salt, her extraordinarily bold novel of a lesbian love affair). For all that, she is generally classed as a crime writer, albeit a very superior one. As one contemporary reviewer commented, ‘Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.

Appropriately for the dog days of British politics, there’s plenty of canine activity in this neatly groomed account of the bizarre circumstances behind the murder plot which cost the Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe his job and his debonair reputation in the 1970s. First yelps from the kennel came from the Honourable Brecht Van de Vater’s five springer spaniels. Ostensibly they added a veneer of respectability to their owner’s comfortable Cotswolds existence. But like many of the characters involved, appearances were illusory. His real name was Norman Vater, the son of a Welsh miner and an undisclosed bankrupt.

During the heatwave in the summer of 1895, the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lords Cricket Ground on 8 July attracted more than 12,000 spectators. Among the crowd that sunny day were two little boys from the East End of London, brothers Robert and Nattie Coombes, aged 13 and 12. That morning they had got themselves up and prepared their own breakfast. Their mother was in the house, but she wasn’t able to see to her boys, because during the night Robert had killed her. He had stabbed her with a knife bought expressly for this purpose and then, just to be sure she’d perished, put a pillow over her face. In the days that followed, Robert and Nattie had a fine old time. They went again to watch the cricket, where they saw W.G. Grace score his seventh century of the season.

The plot of Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four begins in 1989, with the murder of Shoko, a seven-year-old girl. Fourteen years later the perpetrator has yet to be apprehended, and the case is viewed as Tokyo’s police force’s most damning failure. The commissioner of police plans to visit the home of Shoko’s father to pay his condolences, and to insist that the murderer will be brought to justice. It’s an empty promise. The job of persuading the still grief-stricken father to allow the commissioner into his home lands on the desk of Yoshinobu Mikami, the force’s head of media relations. During this task Mikami comes across an anomaly in the old murder case, one that makes him realise that a police cover-up has been in place ever since.

All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress of a riot as it spreads across a rundown London estate. When Ruben, a black man of fragile nature, is accidentally killed in a police action, his friends and neighbours gather to protest his needless death. This peaceful demonstration ignites into violence and looting. Resident Cathy Mason and her family are caught up in the dangers of that night and the ones that follow. Slovo takes the London riots of 2011 as her blueprint, but she moves beyond that, focusing not only on the local people but also on the new Commissioner of Police and the Home Secretary, both of whom are using the riots for their own political ends.

Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term dietrologia, which translates, not very happily, as ‘behindology’, presumes that shadowy consortia are everywhere manipulating political scandals. A Woman Much Missed, the fourth of the excellent Commissario Soneri thrillers to be translated into English, unfolds in present-day Parma amid rumours of Mafioso-style machinations. As always, Varesi’s lugubrious, cigar-puffing detective Soneri retains a degree of disabused integrity and is a trencherman, moreover, as he seeks out only the best buffalo-milk mozzarella and bottles of Bonarda red. Under it all, though, lies a deepening corruption, where justice may not prevail.

On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher, wounded many others, then turned their guns on themselves. Among the many questions fired at Klebold’s stunned parents in the wake of this appalling event, two were especially hard for them to hear. Did they ever hug their kids? And — this from one of the many bereaved — ‘Were you a family that ever spent much time at the dinner table together?’ When brutal and frightening things happen, people want brutal and frightening explanations: the need for causality becomes paramount. If this family bred a monster, then they must have done something monstrous.