Mark Billingham's series character Tom Thorne is in many ways an atypical detective to have as the main focus for the sort of hard-bitten police procedural novels that the UK seems to specialise in producing.
On the surface, he's very easy to write off as a John Rebus clone. Sharp-tongued, fond of a drink and with a moderately complicated personal life, he does sound like Ian Rankin's iconic figure. And yet, Thorne is much less of a maverick. A good Thorne investigation - and 2010's From the Dead certainly has elements of precisely that - sees the central character work rather conspicuously with his colleagues, rather than going off on his own track. Additionally, Rebus' rampant alcoholism and soap opera of personal entanglements are replaced with Thorne's ability to stop drinking before he crosses any lines and seemingly-stable relationship with a colleague.
What really set Billingham's series apart from Rankin's or most others, to be honest, is the inventiveness of the scenarios he sets his readers up with. From the Dead begins with two unnamed criminals setting fire to a car with a man inside it, and a throwaway remark from one suggests that the other is faking his own death in the process.
Before this becomes slightly too Guy-Ritchie-esque for its own good, we jump ahead a decade and meet Anna Cunningham, who is busily seducing a man in a sushi restaurant for reasons which become abundantly - and amusingly - clear quite rapidly. Such is Billingham's ability to provide memorable scenes without any real warning.
As the plot begins, it appears that the burning of the car was indeed a death being faked. Alan Langford - a shady businessman - was meant to have been in the car and his widow Donna was found guilty of arranging the hit. She's been released from prison after a decade inside, but has been sent an anonymous letter with a photo showing a man who could only have been her supposedly-late husband looking anything but dead.
Donna enlists the services of a private detective, who in turn involves Thorne as he was the original investigating officer. Thorne is smarting from a more recent trial which appears to be going wrong, as well as dealing with some questions over his relationship, and is understandably reluctant to re-investigate what had apparently been a cut-and-dried case from a decade ago. Events, perhaps unsurprisingly, rapidly convince him that there is indeed something more sinister afoot and the pair pool their resources to rake over the details of events a decade earlier. The matter is complicated further by the disappearance of Donna's daughter, Ellie, whom she suspects Alan of having kidnapped in a final act of retaliation.
Billingham's customary sense of humour shines through at the most unexpected moments in this novel. Thorne conducts part of the investigation in Yorkshire and spends some time comparing the detectives he meets there with his own London-based colleagues and working out the personality types that every team contains, often with amusing results. The officiousness of various superiors is satirised, particularly with the creation of a series of silly policing acronyms, too.
Importantly, though, Billingham never has the humour feel forced. This clearly comes from his background as a comedian and scriptwriter, where the importance of the funny lines seeming natural is key. The dialogue in the investigative team meetings, for example, is entirely plausible, with one young detective's suggestion of "I've been wondering about tax evasion" (as a means of capturing Langford) being greeted with Thorne's immediate response of "I wouldn't try it. It's illegal", the kind of exchange familiar to anyone who's been in a meeting which perhaps took just a little bit too long.
Eventually, the investigation leads Thorne to the south of Spain - the "Costa del Crime", as many of his colleagues term it. This, of course, gives rise to plenty of cultural-misunderstanding jokes (the deadpan riff from a Spanish policeman about the apparent health benefits of cosmetic surgery is vintage Billingham), but the humour never overstays its welcome or overshadows the investigation itself.
If there's a flaw in From the Dead, it would be the pacing of the plot. After the initial flurry of leads, things genuinely peter out until the final 60-80 pages in Spain. While this is more than likely the way an investigation like this would work in the real world, the entire point about crime fiction is that we don't get treated to every single painstaking exploration of a dead end - yes, realism is the key in this style of fiction, but it's realism to an end, rather than realism for realism's sake.
As a result of this, the final few twists in the plot feel more like the result of Billingham having painted himself into a corner rather than the "thrilling conclusion" such a novel really deserves. The blurb on the back of my copy makes a lot of "nothing and nobody are what they seem", which really isn't true. One of the "not what they seem" characters, frankly, had me scrambling back through the earlier chapters to remember just who they were meant to be, which isn't ideal in any regard. The deus ex machina style of ending really feels beneath a writer like Billingham, who seems to specialise in pulling the rug out from under the reader.
In fairness, there is a very sensitively-written coda to the novel in which some earlier loose ends are resolved in unexpected ways which redeems a lot of the issues with pacing. One wonders, in a sense, whether this was the novel Billingham had intended to write, only for From the Dead to appear instead.
This isn't Thorne's finest moment by any means, but it's a very strong read nonetheless. The beauty of the Thorne series is that one doesn't really have to have read the earlier instalments to pick up the next one, so this is not a bad place to start.
3.5 stars.
