Susie Dent

Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their rides of suspense give a good thrill, but it’s rarely a comfortable one. If it’s cosy detection we’re after, we usually look to the past, as Dylan Thomas clearly did: ‘Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.’  Rennie Airth, with his series of John Madden mysteries, provides a middle way, and one that in many ways feels altogether nobler. The Reckoning is the fourth of Madden’s cases. It sees our man in retirement from his role in Scotland Yard, a few years after the conclusion of the second world war.

The term ‘psychological thriller’ is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores motivations while keeping blood and chainsaws to a minimum. In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful. In the novels of Nicci French, however, there is little ambiguity: their pattern is to deliver the mental shock-equivalent of a dead body, followed only later by a real one. It is an effective formula — as Alfred Hitchcock put it: ‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.’ Among the best of Hitchcock’s own psychological thrillers is Spellbound, whose story unusually wrapped the subject of psychoanalysis around a murder mystery.

Historians still argue over whether the regime of the GDR can be called a totalitarian one. Some say that the definition reduces the difference between the Socialist Unity Party and National Socialism —that the Nazis left millions dead while the SED left millions of Stasi files. It’s a loaded question, and one that will occur frequently to the reader of Maxim Leo’s startlingly powerful Red Love, a memoir of his childhood in the GDR. But as the political theorist Hannah Arendt observed, ‘storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it’. In this case the story is real, and is not one but many, running back and forth over the lives of Leo’s family as they form and re-form their relationship with their country.