THERE was a time when creators of crime fiction penned short, tightly written books, books that concentrated on essential matters, such as character, suspects, red herrings, the progress of the investigation and the final elucidation of the mystery and the apprehending of the guilty party. That time is more or less dead and gone, and now they give us long, rambling tomes that remind me of expensively got up presents which, when the various layers of tissue paper have been removed, turn out to contain very little to get the teeth into.
A case in point is The Brimstone Wedding (Viking, £16 in UK), by Barbara Vine - Ruth Rendell wearing a different hat. This could well have been entitled "The Archers of Norfolk, a story of country folk", containing as it does a narrative that meanders' comfortably in and out of the doings of the inhabitants of the village of Stoke Tharby and its environs.
Genevieve - Jenny for short - is a carer in the Senior Citizens' home of Middleton Hall. She is in her early thirties, has a husband, Mike, a blow in lover, Ned, and is fanatically superstitious. Forming a friendship with Stella, one of the inmates of the home, she is slowly - tooth grindingly so - furnished with an account of the old lady's life and of the mystery that lies at its core. Anyone on sniffing terms with crime fiction will tumble to the "mystery" before many pages are perused.
With this putative tension at its core dissipated, the book becomes a long, chatty account of the intertwined lives of Stella and Jenny. with Ned turning out to be faithless and Stella filling a number of tapes with her ramblings before popping off to a better world. Not a book that held my attention, although there are millions who will disagree.
Reginald Hill is at it too, in his latest Dalziel and Pascoe opus, The Wood Beyond (HarperCollins, £14.99 in UK). As aficionados of the series will know, fat Superintendent Dalziel is jolly Olly to Inspector Pascoe's more pensive Stan and, in the past, they have made a felicitous twosome. The Yorkshire settings and dialect also give a nice condiment touch to the narratives, and have formed the background fittings to strong story lines that, more to the point, have stayed nose to the trail.
In this one, too many threads are being manipulated, as Pascoe searches out the reason for his great grandfather's execution in the first World War, while Dalziel dallies with a well endowed matron known as Cap Marvell, who is the leader of a group of animal rights activists - Hill even has the fat policeman come out with "Ee, that were grand", at the culmination of a lunchtime coupling with the Cap.
Simon Shaw sets his thrillers in the world of theatre, and peppers them with a generous quotient of humour. In The Company of Knaves (HarperCollins, £14.99 in UK), he has his actor murderer anti hero, Philip Fletcher, on the trail of a knighthood, and using all the nefarious means at his disposal to attain it. The pace is fast, the London settings appropriately sleazy, and the satire ranges from grey to very black indeed. I particularly liked the set piece in which Fletcher, in drag, frightens off a yob by brandishing his Smith and Wesson .38 and is described by the author as being in his "Dirty Harriet" mode.
A writer who can always be depended upon for a good read in the mystery genre is Nicolas Freeling, and in his new Henri Castang novel, A Dwarf Kingdom (Little, Brown, £15.99 in UK), he hits the bull once again. This is cerebral crime fiction as opposed to the more "kick em in the goolies" type, with Castang temporarily retired and holidaying in Biarritz, but still pursued by the demons from the wrong side of the track. Here, however, he has to put a lifetime of crime fighting behind him and ally himself with darker forces in order to retrieve his kidnapped grand daughter, and the dilemma he finds himself in just about puts a premium on his sanity. Highly satisfying.
Graham Ison is also a professional - he was a policeman before devoting his time to fictionalised crime. His Blue Murder (Little, Brown, £15.99 in UK) features newly promoted Commander Tommy Fox of Scotland Yard, as he investigates a triple murder on board a yacht moored off the Cyprus coast. The trail leads to a business in pornographic movies, another death. and various encounters with specimens from the London underworld. Ison writes nice, tongue in cheek prose and his protagonist is very well drawn. A definite plus for this one.
Campbell Armstrong has produced a number of well written espionage yarns, and in Heat (Doubleday, £15.99 in UK) he finishes off the loose trilogy begun in Jig and carried on in Jigsaw. Counter terrorist agent Frank Pagan has long been on the trail of the enigmatic and ruthless assassin for hire Carlotta, and now the grand finale is about to take place. But has Pagan become so fixated on the woman that he will be unable to act when confronted by her? In a deadly cat and mouse game, the two of them circle each other until a catharsis of a sort is achieved. Leaving the ending slightly open, Armstrong may be hinting that we have not seen the end of either Pagan or his opponent.
Finally, there is Carol O'Connell and her Killing Critics (Hutchinson, £15.99 in UK). This is the third novel to feature Detective Sergeant Kathy Mallory, a kind of cop from hell who eschews all human emotions and goes robot like about her duties. I have found it very difficult to warm to this series. The over blown prose style and the stilted settings grate on me, while the comic book heroine leaves me cold. In this one she is investigating crime in the art world - no, not the ones being perpetrated on the public by rotten artists, but a twelve year old double murder.
Reopening the old case uncorks the proverbial can of worms, and new killings are committed to try to conceal the motives for the original. There is plenty of violence and mayhem, and a rather engaging older cop named Riker who, in the end, decides not to swallow his pistol. Mallory rides off into the sunset, but one has one of those hollow feelings that she will return.