Geoffrey Vine reviews the latest crime novels.
Being English, I grew up with the image of the avuncular village bobby (well, avuncular until he nicked me and some of my 8-year-old mates for scrumping gooseberries).
Later, as a naïve young reporter on the press bench of seedy magistrates courts, my views of the police began to change.
When I came to Dunedin and flatted with a policeman, I realised the justice meted out by his size 14s was anything but avuncular.
Crime writing has followed a similar gradual awakening from gentleman detectives to brutal reality.
Fictional detectives now are introverted characters, aware of their faults, often loners who buck the rules, driving their superiors to distraction but redeeming their reputations by solving baffling crimes.
Battling their personal demons often takes more time and talent than fighting the mirage of a criminal tsunami.
A veteran of the genre is RJ Ellory, who has written a brutally dark work encapsulating the best and the worst of this fictional hero.
The famous police squad that helped oust the Mafia from their city is acknowledged in the title, Saints of New York (Orion, $38.99, pbk) but the story focuses on the son of one such policeman, who received many decorations
Frank Parrish's own career in the NYPD is haunted by his father's hero reputation.
Parrish thinks he knows the truth about his father and the tension between the public and private images drives him deep into alcoholism, depression and a suicidal nightmare where, faced with finding a predator who has been raping and killing teenage girls for years, Parrish turns into his father and breaks every rule in the book.
It is not light reading but it is hard to put down.
Elena Forbes has created an interesting and strong character in Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia, a London policeman of Scottish-Italian descent.
In her third novel, Evil in Return (Text, $39, pbk), she explores this compelling character in greater depth as he investigates a series of bizarre murders of a group of men who had been at university together.
Tartaglia's flaw is his attractiveness to women linked with an inability to commit to one relationship.
This vibrant sexual subplot adds to the novel's edgy feel and increases the good-read factor.
At the other end of the publishing stakes, HarperCollins is promoting Aucklander Ben Sanders as a major new writing talent but it is unfortunate the firm did not unearth a major new editing talent to ensure Sanders' debut novel The Fallen ($29.99, pbk) met at least basic literary standards.
Fiction requires the reader to suspend belief to some extent but when, in the opening chapter, a character breaks an unprotected window in an Auckland pharmacy door, reaches in and unlocks the door, then steals drugs from an unlocked storeroom, credibility flies out the window.
Similar errors that a good editor would have pointed out occur throughout, together with weather updates at a minimum of once every second page which start off being mildly irritating and, long before the end, drive you mad.
Sanders' basic story about a hard-drinking, rules-flouting detective battling police corruption is good but, with editing, could have been very much better.
A master of the genre is England's Peter Robinson, who has had huge success with his DCI Banks series.
In the latest, Bad Boy (Hodder & Stoughton, $38.99, pbk), Banks is again trying to pick up the threads of his career in North Yorkshire only to see his daughter fall for the charming villain of the title.
Romance turns ugly, love turns into murder and Banks again starts breaking the rules to save his family.
Strong characters, excellent background material and a fast-p
For a newcomer to the genre, a good starting point will be The Dark End of the Street (Bloomsbury, $24.99, pbk).
Edited by SJ Rozan and Jonathan Santlofer, it features short sex-crime stories by many of the best writers in the business, including, among others, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Val McDermid and Edmund White.
- Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
