Crime: To the canon of quirky detectives Ian Sansom has added Israel Armstrong - naive and bookish, gullible and neurotic, and most probably literature's first mobile librarian turned amateur sleuth.
Now there's a premise that could take a bit of work. What's his first mystery - to trace all the overdue books? Well, now you mention it . . .
This is Sansom's second novel, and like his previous, Ring Road, it is set in a suffocating Northern Irish town. The fictional Tundrum is a place mired in insularity, God, and, more worryingly, stock characters who react to outsiders by being sardonic and rude yet somehow brusquely charming in a way that these people only ever are in fiction. Into this arrives Israel, who is Jewish and, despite Irish roots, utterly clueless about the peculiarities of Northern Ireland. He becomes the archetypal fish-out-of-water. A city boy in a rural quagmire, dreaming of cappuccinos and culture, but getting only moonshine and mud.
An underachieving librarian, with a head - and suitcase - full of books, he arrives to find he is to slip to the lowest rung in the library profession. "Around about the level of fake red-leather-bound sets of the Reader's Digest in damp provincial hotels and dentists' waiting rooms is the mobile library".
He discovers that 15,000 library books are missing, and sets out to find them. A series of mildly amusing episodes follows, as Israel blunders through a succession of slapstick mishaps. Unfortunately, like the rusting old mobile library, he rattles slowly towards a conclusion.
The dialogue, for instance, is maddening. If something needs explaining, it is explained several times over as each conversation is a mini-marathon of misinterpretation. There is even an episode in which Israel asks for directions, only to get into a rather predictable "Take a left", "Right", "No left!", and so on, as if he has stepped off the Larne ferry and into a lost 1950s comedy.
Israel encounters a cast of locals who drift in and out often with little to offer the plot other than a little colour. They are largely familiar from the pages or screens of countless books, TV shows and films, although - because Sansom has a keen ear for the north Antrim patois - there is at least an occasional subtlety to the humour that just about gives the story some steam. Sansom's chief problem, however, is that he has more fun with them than with his lead character so that Israel - around whom the author hopes to write a series of adventures - fails to develop as the chapters roll on. What's more, as character after character is thrown at the reader, it reads increasingly like an introduction to a series when it might have been far more substantial if Sansom had kept his eye on the present rather than the future. Ultimately, the first in The Mobile Library series is better borrowed than bought.
The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom, Harper Perennial, 336pp. £6.99
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
