Andrew Taylor

Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses it to produce something fascinating and original in her first novel. In this case the woman in question is Alice. Still reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, she has married the dashing David and acquired a new family in the shape of his welcoming (and wealthy) mother Vivienne and his son Felix by a previous marriage. David’s first wife was murdered, but the killer was caught and is now in jail. Alice moves into the lavishly equipped family home.

Listing page content here As a genre, perhaps the most important question that the thriller asks is this: do we care sufficiently about the hero to want him (or, of course, her) to survive? In this case the hero is Nick Atkins, who in 1989 is just down from Cambridge. On the brink of law school, he spends time in California, where his life is hijacked by Tabatha, a beautiful Stanford student with a taste for Yeats’s poetry. After several months, Tab abruptly and inexplicably decides that their passionate affair is over and sends him home. She promises to communicate occasionally through cryptic small ads in the California Literary Review. For the next 17 years, her teasing, allusive messages flow like a dark sub- terranean current through Nick’s life.

Val McDermid is probably best known for her series of sharply contemporary thrillers featuring a criminal profiler. But some of her standalone novels, in particular the superb A Place of Execution and The Distant Echo, have narrative sections that hark back to a generation earlier; and their plots turn upon the long shadows thrown forward by past crimes. The Grave Tattoo takes this process even further back in time. At the heart of the story is the intriguing historical link between the families of William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian. The two men were schoolfellows, taught by Fletcher’s elder brother. There is a persistent legend that the chief mutineer of the Bounty faked his own death in the South Seas and returned to live and die in the Lake District.

According to George Orwell, even homicide had its golden age. In his 1946 essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, he discusses what he calls ‘our great period in murder’, which was roughly from 1850 to 1925. He holds up nine murders (and ten murderers) whose reputations, he says, have stood the test of time. Jack the Ripper is among them, of course, but he is a category of his own. In the other eight cases, the murderers and their victims were almost entirely middle-class, the settings domestic and poison the favoured weapon. One of these — and arguably the locus classicus, as it were, of the Golden Age of Murder — was the Crippen case. There has not been a major re-examination of the case for nearly 30 years.

Like revolution, fame has a nasty habit of eating its children. On one level Lunar Park explores the perils that an author faces when subjected to the sort of celebrity usually reserved for rock stars and supermodels. It’s not just any old author, either, but Bret Easton Ellis himself. Or is it? The narrator of the novel is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’. ‘There’s one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands’, he assures the reader. ‘All of it really happened, every word is true.’ The early chapters of this book invite the reader to play the chic, post-modern game of Spot the Join.

At the heart of this novel is the notion that a sexual predator can find natural cover for his activities in a war zone. Its title is taken from a Turkish phrase meaning a woman who unwittingly arouses a man’s sexual interest. The narrator, Connie Burns, is a foreign correspondent, born in Zimbabwe, educated at Oxford and at home in the troubled places of the world. In Sierra Leone, she reports on the rape and murder of several local women, and her suspicions are aroused by the presence in Freetown of John Harwood, a former British soldier and mercenary, whom she knew under another name in Kinshasa. Two years later, in 2004, he pops up under a third name in occupied Baghdad as a ‘security consultant’, and there are murders with a similar modus operandi.

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic narrator — though Rivers lacks both the literary panache and the glamorously self-destructive habits of his original. Three young women, two of whom dabbled in prostitution, have been murdered. The principal suspect for the most recent murder is the victim’s boyfriend, now in a coma following a drug overdose.

More than any other literary form, perhaps, the thriller is at the mercy of history — especially that branch of the genre that deals with the rise and fall of empires, the clash of ideologies and the dirty secrets of nations. In the past, most thriller writers, from Buchan to Fleming and beyond, dealt with clear and, above all, present dangers to the body politic. They were concerned, some more plausibly than others, with a world their authors and readers recognised as contemporary. But history has changed direction, and so has the thriller. With the end of the Cold War, the genre has been forced to come to terms with the awkward fact that it no longer has a straightforwardly villainous villain.

At the centre of Michael Chabon’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was a comic book hero known as the Escapist. That book weighed in at a portly 656 pages. The Final Solution revolves around Sherlock Holmes and is a mere stripling by comparison, scarcely more than a novella illustrated with stiff little line drawings. It is a slim novel with a fat one trying in vain to get in. In July 1944, the war is nearing its end and Holmes is teetering on the edge of dotage, a prospect that scares him far more than the Reichenbach Falls. Still keeping bees and smoking foul-smelling shag, he is tempted from retirement by a murder outside the vicarage of a nearby village on the South Downs.