It is a commonplace to say that the finest historical fiction tells us as much about the era in which it is written as it does about the time in which it’s set; the essential questions a writer must ask before setting pen to paper – why these characters, why this place and time? – play a crucial role in determining whether a period novel will be an inert exercise in nostalgia or a resonant work of the engaged imagination.
From the opening pages of 2016's Darktown, the opening instalment in Thomas Mullen's inspired Atlanta, Georgia-set crime series about the first all black unit to police the city, it was clear that these books' considerable force would lie in their ability to function as realistic historical mysteries while urgently addressing issues around contemporary racial violence. The central event in Midnight Atlanta (Little, Brown, £19.99) is the murder of Arthur Bishop, the editor of the city's leading black newspaper.
It is 1956. McCarthyism is still an influential presence in the land, and the young Rev Martin Luther King Jr is making waves in nearby Montgomery, where Rosa Parks has recently inspired that city’s black community to boycott all public transport. Civil Rights Congress activists flock to Atlanta, seeking to highlight (and benefit politically from) Bishop’s death, drawing the attention of FBI agents already monitoring Dr King.
Mullen marshals a politically and socially complex narrative deftly
Ex-cop turned newspaperman Tommy Smith finds himself at the centre of the investigation, as does the white sergeant in command of the black unit, Joe McInnis. It is McInnis’s predicament, caught as he is between the casual but absolute racism of his neighbours who are committed to resist the US supreme court’s Brown ruling on public school desegregation, and his loyalty to his men, that serves as a compelling dramatization of the winds of change to come.
Mullen deftly marshals a politically and socially complex narrative, attentive throughout to issues of class, urban gentrification and police corruption, and delivers an immensely satisfying crime novel, one of the year’s very best.
The domestic suspense sub-genre is based on one central question: can you ever really know the person you’re closest to? After three months in close confinement, many couples might be answering with a resounding ‘All too well’.
The couple in Siobhán MacDonald's Guilty (Constable, £13.99), Dr Luke Forde and his terrible politician wife Alison Thompson, did not need a pandemic to come to that conclusion; they appear to have disliked each other cordially from the very beginning, and MacDonald's skilful recounting of their toxic relationship is meticulous and unsettling.
The novel is persuasively set among the upper middle classes of Co Clare. MacDonald has an unsparing eye for bourgeois pretention and hypocrisy, and she catches the child-man foibles of Luke's fellow doctors with wicked facility. Alison's senator father is perhaps a shade too grotesque, and the Big House Gothic of the Thompson mansion feels overcooked, but this is a terrifically dark, twisty thriller, skilfully plotted and stylishly written.
A foundational text for a great deal of modern domestic suspense is Donna Tartt's The Secret History: an estranged, fractious set of friends obliged to confront their past is a reliable recipe for turbulence, recriminations and revelations, especially if the group's chronicler is blessed with a suitably melancholy, lyrical voice and a nice line in classical reference.
Victoria Gosling's atmospheric literary thriller Before the Ruins (Serpent's Tail, £12.99), which revisits the end of school summer that has haunted Andy and her gang ever since, throws in a ruined manor house for Gothic good luck. It even boasts an epigraph from Plato's Laws, a veritable watermark of its provenance. The plot works perfectly well, the Wiltshire setting is vividly rendered and there is an acute cauterisation of the town and gown divide, but the main event here is the prose: lush, beautifully modulated sentences drive the meditative, romantic narrative to its exhilarating climax:
“The cold rain fell on my bare arms and it fell on London, filling the gutters and flowing into the storm drains. Elsewhere, it fell on woods and fields, on the Savernake Forest and the old earth fort at Barbury, on the manor and whoever lived there now, and … on the gravestone at St Helen’s, where I still thought nothing on earth would ever bring me.”
Remain Silent (Borough Press, £12.99) is the third in Susie Steiner's Manon Bradshaw series, and it is as compulsively readable as its predecessors. The plot centres round a series of suspicious deaths of Lithuanian migrant workers in the Fenland town of Wisbech, and the Tommy Robinson-style movement that has massed to challenge their presence. The principal Lithuanian characters are convincingly drawn, and their well-researched back-story gives the novel an authentically transnational quality, imbuing the bleak mystery with depth and integrity.
All of Temple's many virtues are on display here: an uncanny ear for dialogue, teasing, slow burn wit, a pithy, highly rhythmic prose style and an arresting sense of place
What makes the series such a continuing joy is Manon’s distinctive narrative voice: impatient, quirky, distracted, ever ready with a sardonic crack or a self-deprecating putdown, roiling in midlife delirium. There is perhaps a more contrived flavour to the domestic drama this time round, and the tone tips over at times into Victoria Wood-style skittishness, which can feel jarring. But overall this is a bravura performance, a page-turner and a treat.
It is more than two years since we lost the great Australian crime novelist Peter Temple at the untimely age of 71. The Red Hand (riverrun, £20) is a compendium of good things to supplement the nine novels that remain; it includes an unfinished Jack Irish novel, a screenplay, short fiction, reviews and essays, including the oration he gave on winning the Miles Franklin literary prize for his last novel, Truth.
All of Temple’s many virtues are on display here: an uncanny ear for dialogue, teasing, slow burn wit, a pithy, highly rhythmic prose style and an arresting sense of place. If you haven’t read Temple, begin with The Broken Shore (2005) and you won’t stop; if you have, this collection is an essential and fitting last call for a master of the genre.
