"Domestic Noir" is a term which gets thrown around a bit recently in discussions of crime fiction. Essentially, the style involves taking a crime but showing the way that it breaks open the quiet domestic facades that the characters have erected. In some ways, of course, this is not a new technique - Sherlock Holmes occasionally unearthed society scandals in his pursuits of criminals, and any number of the "Golden Age" novels of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries feature marital infidelity, mental illness, sexual peccadilloes and other subplots as well as Poirot or Marple's triumphant unmasking of the killer.
For my part, one key antecedent of the style is JB Priestley's unnerving play An Inspector Calls. Here, the highly respectable facade of a wealthy family is systematically destroyed by Inspector Goole (retitled as the more anodyne "Poole" in one filmed version of the play) and his investigation of a woman driven to suicide. Priestley's play, which is compulsory viewing by anyone interested in the creation of dramatic tension, ends on an ambiguous note, which is not something the modern purveyors of the style tend to adopt.
Mark Billingham, on the other hand, is an unusual name to associate with the "Domestic Noir" style. Or, perhaps, with crime fiction at all.
Billingham was originally - and still is, occasionally - a stand-up comic of some repute. He first crossed my radar, however, as the hilariously inept soldier Gary opposite Tony Robinson's venal Sheriff of Nottingham in the BBC's Maid Marian and her Merry Men, one of those wonderful programs made for a young audience and featuring plenty of slapstick and stupidity but also replete with puns and political references to keep adults entertained. Billingham's writing career can be said to have begun with a co-writing credit in the episode Tunnel Vision with parodies of everything from "Sonic the Hedgehog" to fantasy roleplaying games and the then-proposed Channel Tunnel involved.
Subsequently, Billingham has become well-regarded for his series featuring DI Tom Thorne. Thorne began as something of a John Rebus clone, only minus the worst of his Scottish inspiration's complex personal life, but has developed very much into his own character. A hallmark of Billingham's Thorne series has been the incredibly twisted setups - copycat serial killers, apparent resurrections and the deliberate causing of locked-in syndrome are all par for the course. While there is humour to be found in Thorne's world, it is truly pitch-black, even more so than many of the Scandinavian stars.
Not wanting to confine his attentions to one character, Billingham has also written a small number of standalone novels in which Thorne plays a very limited role (a voice on the end of a phone call, or a peripheral detective at a crime scene, for example). 2012's Rush of Blood is one of these novels.
The novel opens in a slightly non-linear fashion, and deals with the preparations for a dinner party hosted by Angie and Barry, a married couple living south of London. The guests are two other couples - Sue and Ed and the unmarried Dave and Marina. The six met, it emerges through flashbacks, on holiday in Florida where they all happened to stay at the same resort for a week of sun and relaxation.
Something else happened during their stay as well - the mysterious disappearance of the young daughter of one of the other guests, an American. This event has unsettled each of the British characters in its own way, and unsurprisingly proves to be a central topic of discussion at the dinner party.
As time goes on - and the other couples take their turns at hosting their own dinner parties - the case is investigated by the police in Florida, as well as their counterparts in London when details need to be confirmed. Someone, somewhere is hiding something. The reader is privy to that fact quite early in the piece, courtesy of some very effective scenes told in first-person by the killer (this is, everyone agrees, the sort of disappearance without a happy ending) and a clever technique of providing overviews of conversations without going into detail about who is saying what - or when exactly anything was said.
Being the domestic noir that it is, each character has their own dirty secrets, and these are slowly hinted at throughout the narrative. Depending on the nature of the secrets, their revelation causes further layers of mistrust among the group.
The action really begins to snowball, though, when another child is kidnapped. Even the "killer"'s sections become more tense at this point, and it becomes clear to the group around the dining tables that the stakes are higher than they realised.
In concept, therefore, Rush of Blood has a lot going for it, and not just that domestic noir is very "of the moment".
It doesn't entirely work, though. The final few twists revealing the identity of the killer seem just too contrived to make sense. It's not quite a case of the least- (or even the most-) obvious character turning out to be the killer, but the reader's reaction is more likely to be either "So what?" or "That doesn't make sense" than the hoped-for "Wow!" when the final pieces of the plot are finally fitted together.
Additionally, there are some bizarre loose ends which remain completely unresolved. Dave and Marina, in particular, are characters who deserve a lot more "air time" as the conclusion draws near, and some very important questions about their motivations are left unanswered. It's an easy thing to miss in the intensity that this style of writing requires, but in the hands of Billingham it really ought to have been handled better.
Perhaps most problematically for a novel in this style, though, the characters aren't properly delineated enough to become "real". Barry at one point remarks that he's actually younger than Ed, despite the latter's fast friendship with the very much younger Dave, but for much of the plot the two older men could be practically interchangeable. The same goes for their wives, to be honest. While the police aren't customarily as well-rounded in this style as they might be in others, the two police characters here (one American, one British) are positively two-dimensional, which is a real shame when Billingham has previously created wonderful characters throughout Thorne's station.
The other concern with this novel is that it genuinely doesn't feel like Billingham's writing. His earlier standalone work In the Dark preserves much of his borderline-sadistic plotting and pitch-black humour, but neither of these are really in evidence here.
The plotting has already been touched on, but the humour in Rush of Blood consists more of people making attempts at witty repartee around the dinner table. Full marks, I suppose, for capturing people attempting to be funnier than they are, but there's none of Billingham's customary crackle of dialogue.
To be honest, if it weren't for the fact that my copy identifies the author in large font on the cover, I'd almost wonder if this were either Billingham trying to write like someone else, or someone else attempting to mimic Billingham. Either way, it's a poor mismatch between author and style - and considering the popularity of domestic noir on both page and screen (one thinks here of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train as but two recent examples in both locations), one which may wind up dating poorly as well.
All in all, I'll stick to the Thorne series. 1 star.
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