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Crime fiction: Loose ends, gothic twists and a missing twin

Reviews: Blood Ties, A Man Named Doll, Vera Kelly is not a Mystery, Mirrorland, Every Vow You Break

Blood Ties by Brian McGilloway has some extraordinary scenes between a son and his ailing father, rendered acutely and with great emotional intelligence.

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Declan Hughes
Wed Apr 28 2021 - 06:00

Halfway through Brian McGilloway's marvellous new novel, Blood Ties (Constable, £13.99), Inspector Ben Devlin finds himself in the attic in the middle of the night. Devlin's infirm father, who is staying with the family in anticipation of lockdown – the book's action unfolds across the week leading up to March 14th, 2020 – has fallen out of bed, and Devlin is tasked with locating his son Shane's old bed guard.

Among the dismantled cots and boxes of toys and games are photographs, and Devlin is taken by them: the children as babies and toddlers, a dear departed dog, and Christmas pictures of his parents holding first their granddaughter Penny and then Shane. Devlin notes with shock how little they seemed to change between the two births, and how much has changed since: his mother’s death, his father’s illness.

“For years, we had seemed to be in some sort of happy stasis. As I recovered objects we’d once used to protect our children to now protect my parent, I felt as if I might suffocate with the relentlessness with which time was passing and longed, just for a few moments, for time to set itself in abeyance and give me a chance to catch my breath.”

Blood Ties is the sixth Devlin novel and the first for some years; in the meantime, McGilloway wrote a successful series with a female detective, Lucy Black. Last year’s powerful standalone, The Last Crossing, seemed to break into a deeper, darker register, and Blood Ties occupies a similar emotional range.

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The plot revolves around the murder of a recently released child molester and killer, and the problematic manner in which the loose ends around the teenage victim’s assault and death were all too neatly tied up begins to obsess Devlin. Working easily with his counterpart in the PSNI and ranging back and forth across the Border as if it were notional, Blood Ties works superbly as an expertly structured and recounted crime novel.

Devlin remains as McGilloway envisaged him from the start – neither an alcoholic nor an obsessive incapable of human relationships, but a stable, contented, Mass-attending family man, albeit one with a subtle intelligence, a facility for seeing plain the contradictions inherent in any quest for justice. McGilloway taught English for many years at St Columb’s in Derry, and it’s tempting to see in Devlin something of that college’s renowned civilising influence, a voice for sanity, pluralism and nuance.

But what gives the book its extraordinary force are the scenes between Devlin and his ailing father, rendered acutely and with great emotional intelligence. After the fall, the old man starts to speak more directly of his feelings for his son, and Devlin, overwhelmed, moves to shut things down, “understanding that I’d want to remember every word he’d said but keen for the conversation to be over, too”.

And loss suffuses all: when Devlin spies his father in the back garden, dead-heading last year’s hydrangeas, “the familiarity of the scene, one straight from my childhood, took me back with such force it caught my breath. Then, just as quickly, the sense was gone, leaving me almost grasping at the air in a bid to reclaim it for just a moment longer. But like so much else, it was gone and could not be retrieved.”

What an enthralling, powerful, incredibly moving novel this is. Although a police procedural, Blood Ties does not feel like one, partly because it goes light on procedure, jargon, office politics and the police’s tedious fascination with themselves, but also because Devlin’s narration is in the first person, a point of view more usually associated with the private investigator.

Perhaps growing disenchantment with the police will encourage more PI novels to be published; the good news is that there are two this month, and each is entirely splendid.

A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (Pushkin Vertigo, £8.99) introduces us 
to PI Happy Doll ("I was fifty, Irish and nuts"), who lives "at the base of the hill with the big wooden sign, the one that says: HOLLYWOOD" with his half-chihuahua, half-terrier, George. Doll is a traditional PI who likes to drink a tiny shot of tequila ("a child's portion") in an empty bar and says things like "LA was crying and had been for weeks. The window was being pelted; the noise was like a symphony gone mad."

The plot involves a friend in need of a new kidney and the accidental killing of two men, one of whom is called Paul Madvig, a reference to a character in Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key that pleasingly flags up the novel’s delirious denouement. Ames knows exactly what he’s doing, and keeps the action kinetic but realistic, while imbuing the narration with sufficient hard-boiled style to anchor things firmly within the tradition.

Doll has inherited his house from a former client, and the page on which her tale is told – Buchenwald survivor, violin maker, Hollywood bungalow, the LA Philharmonic – reads like a pen picture from Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets and adds invaluable texture to the rich portrait of LA that Ames evokes.

Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery (Verve, £9.99) by Rosalie Knecht reintroduces us to former CIA agent Vera, who in short order is abandoned by her girlfriend and fired from her film editing job (a character clause is invoked). Inspired by the bundle of Raymond Chandler paperbacks she holds dear, she decides to set up as a private eye in a small office just off Union Square.

It is 1967 and Haight-Ashbury points to a new kind of freedom; Vera demurs: “I saw a whole lot of people acting like children, as if childhood weren’t a state of awful helplessness and dependence.” Engaged by Dominican exiles to find a missing child, Vera goes undercover at a Catholic care home for boys, then follows the trail south to the Caribbean, where the sinister widescreen nightclub and country estate action is redolent of glamorous 1950s-era Hitchcock.

Knecht writes crisply, with salt and sharp wit, and keeps a delightful romantic subplot involving Vassar graduate Max, the foxy proprietress of a West Village lesbian bar, bubbling nicely throughout this smart, intelligent mystery.

Carole Johnstone's debut, Mirrorland (Borough Press, £12.99), is an infernally well plotted, glitteringly written gothic tale of a missing twin, a dark, twisty house of secrets and a magical, unsettling family history of pirates and clowns and fairytale endings. Apt comparisons have been drawn with Stephen King and Gillian Flynn; it made me think of the filmmaker Nicolas Roeg: what a field day he would have had with its parallels and mirrorings, its sleight of hands and conjurer's revelations.

Rules for Perfect Murders was one of my favourite reads last year, so I fell on Peter Swanson's new novel, Every Vow You Break (Faber & Faber, £12.99), with enthusiasm. It has an excellent premise: on her hen night in San Francisco, bride-to-be Abigail Baskin sleeps with a random dude. Now she spots him in New York, days before her wedding: is he stalking her? Will he tell all? Cut to Abigail's honeymoon on a secluded island in Maine, where, alas, a contrived Stepford Wives/Wicker Man mash-up drives the increasingly unlikely plot straight off a cliff.

Swanson has a winning style, and the details of Abigail’s upbringing as the child of summer stock theatre parents are enchanting – I’d read the hell out of that book – but this is one to miss.