David Murray - "The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay"

Most people in Brisbane have at least some understanding of the Allison Baden-Clay murder case. The mother-of-three vanished from her home in April 2012, with her body discovered beside a creek a week or so later. Her husband was tried and convicted for her murder, with the conviction overturned on appeal, and that overturning itself overturned on appeal as well in 2016. For myself, I remember that the friend we were going to use as a wedding photographer was an SES volunteer and hard to pin down, since he was looking for her.

Written by one of the journalists who covered the Baden-Clay case from almost the beginning, The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay is essentially the full story of this murder. David Murray introduces us to both the victim and her killer, as well as their families and the suburb of Brookfield where all of this took place. We're then taken through the investigation step by step from the perspective of the detectives, and then through the trial and subsequent legal twists and turns.
Murray's book provides a couple of useful points for those who got lost somewhere along the line in the case. Importantly, he explains just how wrong the Court of Appeal verdict was which replaced the murder conviction with one of manslaughter. Indeed, he's scathing of the various "experts" who attempted to cast the protests at this verdict as people "misunderstanding" the legal system. While I'm sure there were people who protested it out of a lack of understanding, it's important to remember that the High Court basically held that the Court of Appeal had misunderstood the law. Even I, as very much a former and terrible law student, can understand that following Murray's explanation. It's not a case of "some people might disagree with the idea", so much as "if anyone thinks otherwise, they should probably not be a lawyer."
Murray also points to a couple of interesting loose ends. The identities of the drivers of two mysterious cars are never confirmed, and Murray indicates that on legal advice he can't explain who is generally assumed to have been involved here. The strong implication of who it could be is a remarkably distasteful one, I must say. Of perhaps more interest, though, Murray also points out that the "running clothes" Allison Baden-Clay was wearing when her body was found may in fact not have been precisely that, and also that there's no reason to assume she was killed after an argument, as I and others have often thought.

There are even some slightly amusing relevations, too. My favourite image is the picture Murray draws of the detectives trying different techniques to work out what could have happened, including driving a number of cars around at different times of the evening (with and without "bodies" in them). Eventually, the question is asked as to whether Allison's running shoes would have looked different if she'd tied them versus if someone else had, so the detectives spend some time tying each other's shoes, with no discernible discoveries. Well, none beyond the fact that one of their number apparently ties each shoe differently from each other shoe!

Good though those features are, Murray's book is a victim of a very common flaw in true-crime writing - namely, that he never met a fact he didn't like. In many ways, this reflects the fact that many such books are written by journalists themselves, and may start being written before the verdict is handed down, so it's hard to know what might be relevant.
As it stands, however, there are certain digressions in this book which simply don't need to be there. The blow-by-blow recounting of Gerard Baden-Clay's father's childhood in what was then Northern Rhodesia, for example, is probably irrelevant, as indeed is the earlier explanation of how Scouting (to which the Baden-Clay family have a strong connection) came about. Quite what benefit the reader obtains by learning that one of the detectives had achieved a particularly remarkable set of bowling figures in club cricket is beyond me, too, as is the extensive coverage of the 2011 Brisbane flood - although here I should note that financial losses caused by the flood are said to have put Baden-Clay under considerable pressure, so some mention makes sense. The frequent digressions into the earlier lives of tangential figures (including the Tzvetkoff family, who are minor witnesses, and Bruce Flegg who was a family neighbour) also aren't all that required, particularly when we realise that Eric Idle (yes, him) plays a role in the latter.

This padding ultimately points to a more serious problem with a book about this murder.
While the Baden-Clay case is justifiably famous, both in legal-historical terms and in Brisbane itself, it's actually a rather simple (and sordid) story. Woman marries narcissistic and abusive husband. Husband begins an affair. Finances get tight. Husband realises he's painted himself into a corner and murders wife. Husband gets what he deserves. Murray makes the point that most murders have motives of money or sex at their bases, and this is a case which had both. By itself, then, that perhaps doesn't merit a book - and certainly not one pushing 500 pages.
However, not to write a book would be seen as a poor result. A famous murder needs - these days, at least - to "mean" something. Including Allison Baden-Clay as one of a number of women killed by intimate partners (as I've seen books doing) seems to do her a disservice of sorts.
Perhaps an editor should have had a look at this and trimmed it mercilessly. Just because a fact can be written about doesn't mean it has to be.

Of interest, but with reservations. Two stars.

Henning Mankell - "The Pyramid"

After the publication of Firewall in 1998, Henning Mankell considered the Kurt Wallander story to be complete. Fans, however, consistently asked him about what had happened to Wallander before his first appearance (Faceless Killers), and Mankell eventually felt that it was important to tell those stories as well. The result was Pyramiden, published in Swedish in 1999, and translated as The Pyramid into English by Laurie Thompson and Ebba Segerberg in 2008.

The Pyramid covers five shorter Wallander cases, spanning everything from his first investigation out of uniform through to the case he had just wrapped up when Faceless Killers began. In a charming touch, Mankell ends that fifth story - the novella The Pyramid - with the same fateful phone call which sends Wallander to a farmhouse where two people have been brutally murdered.
The second, third, and fourth stories (The Man with the Mask, The Man on the Beach, and The Death of the Photographer) are legitimately short stories, with The Pyramid and the appropriately-titled Wallander's First Case which bookend them being slightly longer. The Man with the Mask, indeed, is barely more than a brief sketch of an event which occurred when Wallander was in the process of moving from Malmö to Ystad, the smaller town with which he is so intimately associated.

A recurring thread in these stories is the tenuous relationship Wallander has with Mona, the woman who is his ex-wife by the time the series properly starts. His troubled relationships with his father and daughter, too, play key roles. The irascible man regular Mankell readers know and love is still painting his landscapes (sometimes with a grouse, other times without them), and on one occasion calls the police station and describes himself as "a distant relative, which infuriates Wallander. On the other hand, The Pyramid itself features a moment where Wallander - to say nothing of the reader - genuinely appreciates the depth of feeling the two men appear to have for each other.
We also see a much stronger connection between Wallander and his colleague Rydberg, whose death plays a role in the rest of the series. Many of the pieces of wisdom Wallander holds dear make their debuts in these stories, in fact.

Plot-wise, these stories tend to leave a bit to be desired. The Man on the Beach has a particularly clever plot, but the resolution feels rather staged, while The Death of the Photographer really deserves a much cleverer resolution than the two-dimensional solution provided. The title story has more of Mankell's expected twists and turns, and a resolution perhaps better-crafted than some of the novel-length excursions Mankell has given us over the years.
That said, the reader is unlikely to be reading these as detective stories, so much as for the insights into Wallander's character, and these are plentiful. Mankell, in a foreward, also makes the point that a lot of Wallander's stories focus on the crisis of the Swedish social-democratic state, and that particular concern is omnipresent here, which perhaps explains the "bad guy is bad" resolution so common to the series a bit better.

Not an essential inclusion in the Wallander series, but one which his more dedicated followers will want to read.

3.5 stars.

Barbara Nadel - "Last Rights"

Barbara Nadel is one of the lesser-known lights of what might be termed "location crime", crime fiction set in exotic locations but not written by a local. Think of Donna Leon's Venice, rather than Jo Nesbø's Oslo, for example. Nadel's Çetin İkmen series, set in Istanbul, is often regarded as one of the better introductions to the Turkish metropolis.
Beginning in 2005, however, Nadel has also branched out to other settings. Last Rights, published in that year, is the beginning of her Francis Hancock series - crime fiction set in the East End of London during the Second World War. Squaring the circle somewhat, Nadel has also written a number of novels set in the modern East End, featuring an Englishman and a Turk as investigators.

Last Rights, as mentioned, takes place in a very specific place at a very specific time, London in 1940 as "Jerry" launches the nightly raids which would destroy large parts of the British capital and come to define the war experience for a generation or more of British people. By setting the Hancock series in the East End, Nadel has also given herself the challenge of getting the atmosphere just right - this was a London where Cockney accents still predominated, sectarianism was rife, and a very specific sort of slang was to be heard. Moreover, the novel is narrated in the first person by Hancock, so there's very little room for error.
The effect is quite authentic. We're not just in "music-hall Cockney" territory, although there's a reference to George Formby for those paying attention, and I'm sure some of the characters would happily whistle "My Ol' Man's a Dustman" given half a chance. Nadel even goes so far as to offer a partial glossary of some of the terms towards the end of the novel (although, bizarrely, the radio program ITMA is only given in its initials).

Hancock himself is also worthy of some attention, as he's a very unusual character to feature as a protagonist. He's a devout Catholic and an undertaker - the son and grandson of an undertaker, in fact - who is known to many locals in his area as "The Morgue's Son". More unusually, he's half-Indian, as his father married a woman from Goa when living in India, and much is made throughout the novel of the different skin tones that Hancock and his siblings have. He also suffers from what we would term post-traumatic stress disorder, having served in "the first lot" (the First World War) and seen too many things to remain entirely sane as a result.
While the effects of the mental illness are only really shown as a stutter when the bombs are falling and a general dislike of being in confined spaces (such as bomb shelters), this is an interesting choice for a character. Hancock is clearly intended to be a reliable narrator, despite his difficulties, and Nadel occasionally has difficulty keeping that under control.

Hancock's investigation here begins when, during a raid, a man staggers towards him complaining that he'd been stabbed. Hancock dismisses this, since there's not much blood, and the man carries on. A day or two later, his body appears in Hancock's morgue, and he begins to wonder if there mightn't have been something in the story after all.
Investigations are hampered by the reluctance of the victim's family to look beyond the most obvious suspect, as well as a child who occasionally runs off without any warning. As Hancock digs further, however, he uncovers what appears to be a case of hereditary violence and family secrets.

Unfortunately for Nadel, very little of the plot makes sense. A lot of this is down to the relatively two-dimensional characters she creates - Hancock himself is engaging enough, but there isn't enough to delineate the other characters from each other. Too many of them seem to know things by pure coincidence for the plot to be remotely plausible.
Indeed, by the time the final scenes - which are clearly meant to be dramatic - begin, the effect is more of puzzlement. Characters have, by now, taken to appearing and disappearing for absolutely no reason other than to bring back new chunks of exposition. One character, indeed, explains what's been going on but appears to have had absolutely no motive to do what he did, which is a rather elementary error to make. The "incredibly evil villain" also appears to have had minimal motive.
I'm not sure precisely why these errors were made, but I suspect it's simply a case of trying to juggle too many balls at once. Nadel had already released some six İkmen novels by the time Hancock made his debut here, so we can hardly accuse her of making a rookie mistake. Perhaps hubris came into play?

An interesting character, sadly given a completely wooden plot in which to run.

One star.

Anthony Horowitz - "The House of Silk"

When I reviewed Horowitz' Moriarty last year, I indicated at the time that it was worthwhile to revisit his earlier foray into the Sherlock Holmes universe, 2011's The House of Silk. Re-reading this, particularly in light of the more recent novel, is an interesting experience.

House of Silk is much more in the traditional Sherlock Holmes mode. Watson narrates the plot, constantly marvelling at his friend's intelligence and inserting his own purple prose at times, and Holmes moves effortlessly from high society to the Baker Street Irregulars and back, while chasing fiendish wrongdoing on the part of his client. Lestrade appears, as he always should, and manages to avoid stepping on too many toes.
The plot here is very much in the spirit of Conan Doyle, too. Holmes and Watson are approached by art dealer Edmund Carstairs, who has been disturbed by the appearance of a mysterious - and silent - figure outside his house and his art gallery. Carstairs suspects that this man is part of an American gang hell-bent on getting revenge for acts in the United States, hence his appointment with the denizens of 221B Baker Street. The appearance of the mysterious figure leads to robbery and - shortly thereafter - to murder. The game, as Holmes would doubtless say, is afoot.
Soon, though, things take a very different turn. As both Holmes and Watson remark, this is not the way in which the great detective's cases typically develop (although it is, of course, redolent of more contemporary crime fiction). The disappearance of one of the Irregulars prompts the two men to investigate further, and to uncover mentions of a mysterious organisation known as "The House of Silk". When further murders are uncovered, the situation clearly becomes more dangerous, and both Holmes and Watson are themselves put at risk.
The eventual resolution wraps up both mysteries quite neatly. While the plot includes considerably more action than Conan Doyle traditionally worked into his plots, Holmes' explanations of what had actually happened is a return to the vintage style again, although it does end on a more contemporary note of ambiguity.

But does it work?

I'm not convinced that it does. The problem with revisiting any beloved literary creation (Horowitz has also written some James Bond novels, for example) is that fans of the original will note any deviations from that original. As a confirmed Holmesian myself, there were more than a few moments which didn't quite ring true.
Most of these, interestingly, were Watson himself. He reports dialogue with more than a few anachronisms, and at least one Americanism on Holmes' part. Small points, of course, but they are nonetheless jarring. Horowitz himself is also guilty of some bizarre lapses of continuity - a victim is stabbed, until he's been "shot", and a character is both "Fitzsimmons" and "Fitzwilliams". While neither of these gets in the way of the plot, they're the sort of thing a well-known novelist ought to be able to avoid.
Holmes occasionally, too, becomes a sort of "Holmes-by-numbers". The pipe is there, the violin is there, the seven-percent-solution is there, and Horowitz appears to believe that simply winding him up and pointing him in the general direction of the plot is worthwhile. It doesn't quite work that well.

My other problem, to be frank, is the subject matter. Watson spends rather too much time moralising about Victorian London, which he never does in the originals, and the second (and dominant) part of the plot is an attempt to bring Holmes into a more modern context. I don't want to give that part of the novel away, but the subject matter may be a bit confronting for some.

As another strange note, House of Silk provides yet another "origin story" for Holmes' arch-nemesis Moriarty - and one at odds with the events in the novel of the same name. Hardened Holmesians will know that the "Napoleon of Crime" has whatever origin Conan Doyle wanted him to have for the purposes of the story, but this is quite jarring as well.

While House of Silk has its moments, and there are several of these (a dialogue with Mycroft in which both brothers "out-deduce" each other is remarkable, but unexplained), the effect is less than it should be.

Three stars.

Jo Nesbø - "Cockroaches"

One of the quirks of the "boom" in Scandinavian crime fiction in the past decade or so has been that a number of authors were translated from roughly the middle of their series, rather than from the beginning.
Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series is one of these. The first two novels to see English release were the fifth and third of the series (in that order, somewhat eccentrically), which for a while meant that Hole's first two outings were only available in Scandinavian languages. So keen was I to read them that I'd actually begun to look into obtaining the Swedish translations of the Norwegian originals when finally word came out that they had been translated into English and would be released.

These two novels are very atypical in relation to the rest of Hole's exploits, in that the action takes place almost entirely overseas. The Bat (released in 2012, originally published as Flaggermusmannen in 1997) sees Hole investigating a murder in Australia, while he's sent to Bangkok in Cockroaches (2013, originally published in 1998 as Kakerlakkene). The brilliantly-evoked Oslo atmosphere of the later novels is missing in favour of the more exotic - at least for a Norwegian - setting.
The Australia of The Bat is, frankly, a bit off-key. I can't be so sure about Cockroaches' Bangkok, although Nesbø does manage to work in some suitable period detail - this is the Bangkok of the Asian Financial Crisis, where the baht is incredibly unstable and the economic boom Thailand had experienced is screeching to a halt.
Hole, too, is a different man. His complicated personal life is nowhere to be seen, beyond his sister's Down Syndrome. This is years before his fateful meeting with Rakel and her son Oleg, and even a long time before he develops his complicated friendships with such enduring characters as Ellen Gjelten, Beate Lønn, and the rest of the Oslo Crime Squad. All things considered, he's actually rather deferential to Bjarne Møller when ordered to fly to Bangkok, although the perceptive reader will notice that his first meeting with Tom Waaler doesn't exactly set them up to be bosom friends.

Hole is sent to Bangkok in order to investigate the murder of the Norwegian ambassador, Atle Molnes. Molnes, it emerges, was found dead in what may or may not be a brothel (one of the characters makes reference to acts which aren't quite legal or illegal, and that seems to be the world in which this hotel exists), by a prostitute dressed - somewhat incongruously - as Tonya Harding.
Aside from the general desire to avoid a scandal, as Molnes has political connections to the Christian Democrats in Norway, Hole's mission is to resolve the murder as quickly as possible. Of course, as those of us who know the byzantine ways Hole's mind works can probably already guess, "as quickly as possible" is just not going to happen. Secrets and lies get in the way, both at the embassy and among the ambassador's family, and Hole's famous instincts are put to the test on several occasions.

Cockroaches is an improvement over the more linear plotting of The Bat, but it's clear that Nesbø was still finding his feet as a novelist in this early Hole outing. The multi-faceted plots familiar to readers in the more recent novels are simply not there, although some political and financial corruption does surface as Hole investigates.
Overall, though, there's still not the abiding sense of character that Nesbø would later develop. Hole is a sort of "everyman with advantages", rather than the complex and deeply flawed figure he would soon become. There's a sense here that he could be Sam Spade, simply transported forward in time and given a new nationality.

More broadly, one could question whether this is truly "Scandi-crime" anyway, since it takes place in Bangkok. While it touches on the social considerations that genre tends to, the nature of the plot makes it perhaps more "Thai noir" than anything else.

Two and a half stars. Fans of the series will love it, but it's not Nesbø at his best.

Jo Nesbø - "Police"

Carrying on almost directly from its predecessor Phantom, 2013's Police (published in Norwegian in the same year as Politi) sees the Oslo crime squad investigating yet another baffling series of murders.
This time, as a very atmospheric prologue shows us, the victims are themselves policemen. It gradually emerges that they're being killed at the scenes of unsolved murders that they themselves had helped to investigate. Once again, it seems that a serial killer is stalking the streets of the Norwegian capital, and this one has a thoroughly unusual motive.

But where in all of this is Harry Hole? Things were left on a knife-edge at the end of Phantom, and it seems that Hole may not be able to assist his colleagues in the same way as he had previously done. The tall man under guard in the hospital may - or may not - be precisely who we think he is. Will Hole's colleagues, including Katrine Bratt who joins the team from Bergen, be able to unravel this incredibly complicated series of crimes?

Police is Jo Nesbø, if not at his finest, certainly at his most complex. Even as the plot spirals towards its dramatic conclusion, there are two or three more suspects introduced who are at least plausible killers. There's mental illness, and mental illness suffered by at least three important characters no less. There's even a strong implication that one of Hole's colleagues is killed by a separate killer, which is a plot thread I rather hope is examined in a later novel.
Oh, and the police corruption hinted at in Phantom is front and centre by now. The odious Mikael Bellman seems intent on cementing his position as the Oslo chief of police, but this may have to come at the expense of his doggedly-loyal underling Truls Berntsen who has been suspended from the police over some suspicious payments he's received. There's less of a focus on Berntsen in this novel, but I get the strong sense that Nesbø really enjoys writing such a thoroughly objectionable character.
There's a fair bit of gore involved, too. Some of the deaths involved are pretty cinematic in their execution, and a few of the investigating officers find it all too dramatic as well.

Does it all work? Well, it's hard to give a definitive answer without giving too much of the plot away. What I can say is that Nesbø is just about able to keep all the balls in the air most of the time.
There are a few scenes (even the final chapter) which rely on the sneaky technique of setting the reader up to think they're watching one thing, only for it to be something completely different in reality. That's a relatively common trope in Nesbø's writing, and I can hardly begrudge him falling back on what he knows best, but when you can point to perhaps five instances in which it's used in a 600-odd page novel, perhaps that's a bit unfortunate.

It's also clear to see why Nesbø keeps attempting to write Hole and his team out of existence. This is a novel which goes to some pretty dark places and hints at even darker ones to come. Writing something like that every couple of years would take it out of many people.

A 3.5-star rating here. There may just have been too much going on for this to work perfectly.

Gilbert Adair - "A Mysterious Affair of Style"

I've reviewed Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd earlier on this blog, and at the time that it was written, Adair apparently intended it to be a standalone novel. 2007's followup, A Mysterious Affair of Style, seems to have come about as a perverse attempt at "never repeating himself", if we give the dedication any credence - Adair realised that because he'd never written a sequel, writing a sequel was therefore something different to do. Nonetheless, here we are.

Style, which of course owes its title to Agatha Christie's debut The Mysterious Affair at Styles, picks up roughly a decade after Evadne Mount and the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe solved the earlier case. Trubshawe is enduring a rather bland retirement, when he happens to renew his acquaintance with Mount after stopping in at the Ritz for a cup of tea.
Mount invites him along to a charity variety performance, which is scheduled to begin with a brief sketch she'd written, and this leads (via a rather interesting, if under-explored, satire on stage whodunits) to a renewal of acquaintances with Cora Rutherford - Mount's long-standing friend and another character from Murgatroyd. The world has moved on since the earlier case, with some off-hand references to the aftermath of the Second World War providing a bit of colour. For our purposes, though, what's more important is that the cinema has replaced the stage as the premier location for actors.
Rutherford is cast in a film by the director Alastair Farjeon, and sees this as a way of reviving her flagging fortunes. Unfortunately, "Farje" has been killed in a fire, and the film is in doubt.

The plot meanders along through all of this before - roughly halfway through - arriving at the dramatic scenes as Rutherford's scenes are filmed. All of this leads to a seemingly impossible murder, committed in plain view of almost everyone on the set, but with very few motives among those who had the opportunity.
Mount and Trubshawe are drafted in by the younger policeman investigating the murder, and gradually discover that while the lack of motive may be true, all the suspects had a strong motive to commit an earlier murder, but yet no opportunity. What can it all mean? Well, in Mount's hands, it leads to the conclusion to the whole mystery and a rather surprising (cinematic, I suspect) denouement.

Does it work, though? Ultimately, no it really doesn't.

As in Murgatroyd, the plot gives Adair plenty of opportunity to come up with bizarre scenarios for whodunits. This time, the scenario's are Farjeon's films, rather than Mount's novels. The problem is, though, that while there are some very creative ideas, Farjeon himself is sufficiently clearly a caricature of Alfred Hitchcock that Adair needs to parody Hitchcock's films. The jokes are clever, but much more heavy-handed than they probably need to be - as an example, An American in Plaster of Paris sees a character with a broken leg attempt to investigate the murder he thinks was committed in the apartment above him, with all comparisons to both Rear Window's plot and An American in Paris' title being entirely intentional. Jokes like this confirm that it's surprisingly easy to be arch and clever without being particularly funny.
Style also gives Adair more of a chance to play around with the form of the classic whodunit. The solution doesn't break nearly as many rules as Murgatroyd did, but the meandering nature of the plot (the murder doesn't occur until about the halfway point, which prompts the characters to make throwaway remarks about how strange a whodunit would be if the murder didn't occur until the halfway point) doesn't really seem like an improvement. There's an awful lot of the characters standing around and waiting for the plot to switch on again, rather than anything genuinely happening - and, sadly, none of the characters are sufficiently three-dimensional to be interesting in the absence of a plot.

In the long run, that's the flaw in Style. Where Murgatroyd didn't quite work as a whodunit but worked as a snarky parody, Style works as neither by trying too hard to be both.

Two stars.