At the centre of Ian Rankin’s new John Rebus mystery, A Heart Full of Headstones (Orion, £22), stands Tynecastle police station on Gorgie Road near the Hearts football ground, and the deft strokes with which this grim location is sketched — on a bleak square with an unloved grassy area; hemmed in by a mixture of tenements, workshops and garages; mesh-covered windows staring blearily from the upper level; battleship-grey facade retouched to cover up indecipherable graffiti; black Sharpie daubs on the front door — foreshadow the turbulent legacy of corruption housed within. DI Siobhan Clarke and DC Christine Esson, investigating Francis Haggard, a Tynecastle officer accused of domestic abuse, find their inquiries are stonewalled; as they leave, a passing uniform yells to his male colleagues, “I see we’re too late for the strippers.”
“What century is this?” DC Esson mutters.
“They’ll be dangerous if they ever learn to make fire,” Clarke replies.
With Rebus, who has taken an informal commission to locate a missing man from wheelchair-bound gang boss Ger Cafferty, seemingly implicated in the historical police misconduct on Gorgie Road, his would-be nemesis, DI Malcolm Fox inevitably joins the case; when Haggard turns up dead, the game is very much afoot.
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Rankin has a dramatist’s gift for keeping the action continually on its feet and marshalling an adroitly cast range of characters with verve and agency. With a labyrinthine plot masterfully spun, an atmospherically rendered Edinburgh, a satisfyingly mordant side of the mouth tone, a very good dog named Brillo and skilfully set and staged storytelling, A Heart Full of Headstones is a superlative performance.
The Book of the Most Precious Substance (Faber, £14.99) is the new novel by Sara Gran, so while we assume there will be some kind of investigation, however unconventional and haphazard, we can also expect it to be quick with the uncanny, the numinous, the sense that the border between this world and the next is all too easily breached. The extra dimension here is sex — the ancient tome is “the most precise, and most effective grimoire of sex magic ever written”, guiding the reader through five steps, each corresponding to a different bodily fluid.
Lily Albrecht was once on the threshold of a glittering literary career with an acclaimed, internationally bestselling debut novel. She married the man of her (erotic) dreams, Abel, a genius in several fields — literary theory, biography, painting — “a man you would see in black and white and think. They don’t make them like that any more.” “We were sure we could do anything: write, paint, make art, spin gold from straw. Even fall in love and stay in love.” But Abel falls ill with early-onset dementia and now spends his days in a chair, silent and inaccessible. Lily has stopped writing and, as a rare books dealer, ekes out a living just about sufficient to keep a nurse for Abel. When a fellow dealer alerts her to a high six-figure offer for an occult book called The Precious Substance, Lily leaps at the chance of some life-changing money and embarks on the search.
As Lily and her bookselling accomplice track down the extant copies of the book, they enact the rituals, and Lily steadily regains and expands her sexual appetite. What Gran is effectively dramatising here is recovery: straitened, grief-stricken Lily begins to thrive and becomes greedy for experience. Should she have been more careful in what she wished for? Perhaps. But the lavish, extravagant, delirious way Gran charts the course makes it all seem worthwhile. This is a funny, charming, troubling, genuinely erotic novel in which the sex features not simply as a metaphor; it is the very essence of the endeavour (the clue is in the title). This is a book of signs and wonders, a marvellous, magical novel.
In Rosalie Knecht’s Vera Kelly Lost and Found (Verve, £9.99), Max, the foxy bartender from the lesbian bar in Greenwich Village has moved in with Vera: “…with her percolator and sewing machine balanced in the rear-view mirror, we drove over the Manhattan Bridge just after the sun had set …” Navigating domesticity and the bohemian life in 1971 Brooklyn, Vera juggles PI cases for the gay community with the occasional film editing gig. Max, a former Vassar music student whose oil-rich family slung her out after catching her with a girlfriend, is writing an opera about the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Max’s sister asks her to visit the family compound in Bel Air because their father has moved his mistress in and filed for divorce. Vera rides shotgun to LA and marvels at the Hearst-like castle surrounded by “arcades of white columns, by shrubbery, by fountains with spewing gods” that is the family seat.
Max’s father, Aloysius, who is vehemently hostile to his daughter, has that quintessential Californian adornment in attendance, a poetic, necklace-wearing middle-aged guru with a rubbery English accent called St James. Vera feels Aloysius is “organised by anger, that his prodigious energy derived from it. It was his parents who had made the money. What does that leave a person to do?” Max disappears and Vera must track her down. This is a quieter, more linear affair than its two predecessors; I sometimes wanted Vera to pick up one of the PI cases she had left hanging. But Knecht writes so stylishly and evocatively and with such emotional perspicacity — about a California road trip, and a private mental institution, and Vera’s pinched and frightened mother — and ends on a lyrical Fourth of July flourish to fill the heart. Highly recommended.
Bleeding Heart Yard (Quercus, £14.99) is the third novel by Elly Griffiths in her DI Harbinder Kaur series, and sees Kuar transferred from Brighton to the Met CID Homicide and Serious Crimes Unit. One of her new colleagues, DS Cassie Fitzgerald, has almost entirely suppressed the memory of how she and her schoolfriends killed a fellow pupil. Thirty years later, at a reunion, another friend is found murdered; investigating the case is Cassie’s new boss, DI Kaur. The tight circle of friends with a deadly secret history, the consequences of which erupt in the present day, is a reliable blueprint, and Griffiths — a witty, perceptive, entertaining writer — delivers a well-crafted thriller. But Kaur seems diminished somewhat by her removal from Brighton, from her delightful family and especially from her eccentric band of crime-solving misfits first seen in The Postscript Murders. They finally pop up on the last page here, but I wish they’d been around from the start.
Black is the Night (Titan, £18.99) is a collection of stories in tribute to Cornell Woolrich, the noir master whose work inspired Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black and many other film adaptations. Edited by Maxim Jakubowski, who published Woolrich reprints in the 1980s, and with a lyrical foreword by Neil Gaiman, Woolrich’s desolate aesthetic makes Patricia Highsmith look like PG Wodehouse, and the stories here reflect that. I especially liked Kim Newman’s elegantly turned Black Window, and James Sallis’s Parkview, which has more than a flavour of MR James, while Barry N Malzberg’s terse, biographical The Phantom Gentleman captures the dream and the darkness of Woolrich’s seedy decline.
