Mark Billingham - "Lazy Bones"

How do you investigate a murder when the victim is someone the world seems better off without?
This is a question that almost every fictional detective - or at least their creator - has had to grapple with since crime fiction moved from the genteel drawing rooms of Agatha Christie's novels and into the gritty realism readers seem to expect these days. Of course, at least one of Christie's most famous novels sees Hercule Poirot investigating the murder of a character who doesn't seem particularly pleasant, and who turns out to have been much less than that (Murder on the Orient Express), and many of her other victims at least had one or two associates who were pleased to see their demise.
Nonetheless, particularly as the police procedural has become a popular vehicle of storytelling, victims are increasingly likely to have been "shady" at best, and downright repugnant at worst. Most novelists seem to get around this by giving their characters a slightly over-developed sense of justice, or by taking the more "hardboiled" route by creating some kind of an "honour among thieves".

Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne is faced with this dilemma in Lazy Bones, the third instalment (2003) in that series after the twisted plots of Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat. In this instace, the dilemma is caused by the fact that the first victim is a recently-released sex offender, a man who many on the case seem rather pleased "got what was coming to him".
Thorne reluctantly takes on the case and leads a team which appears to be going through the motions rather than full of any real hope of catching the killer, despite the violent brutality of the killing itself. We're thus treated to more of the private lives of the central characters in Billingham's series - Phil Hendricks, the gay gothic pathologist, Dave Holland whose girlfriend is weeks away from giving birth, and Thorne himself with his father in the early stages of dementia. While it's comparatively easy to have the obligatory "pathologist" and "detective partner" characters reduced to two-dimensional ciphers (something which even Ian Rankin can be accused of at times), it's clear that Billingham actually cares enough about his supporting cast to give them lives outside of their work. Hendricks and Thorne have a wonderfully easy friendship characterised by wisecracks and football-related banter, and I really can't think of another example of this being done this well in contemporary crime fiction.
Thorne, for his part, is even given a romantic interest, which gives rise to even more banter among his colleagues.

Billingham, as I've indicated elsewhere, is a comedian and actor who turned his hand to fiction. This isn't to say that the Thorne series is "written for laughs" or even that it plays the comic card to the exclusion of the plot. What it means here is that, in contrast to other authors who have amusing scenes in their novels, Billingham genuinely understands the dark humour inherent in what he's writing.
Thorne, for example, begins the novel in a "Restorative Justice Conference", where a young hoodlum is being made to apologise to the elderly couple he broke into the house of. Where a John Rebus, to take a classic example, would find this a waste of time, Thorne is brilliantly cinematic in his reactions both during and after the event. The later inversion of this scene, where Thorne is able to deliver something of his own "restorative justice" to another young ratbag, is all the more amusing for it.
But it's not all careful parody of corporate doublespeak (although the reactions by most of the police to the edicts of the top brass are clearly written by someone who's had to sit through one too many "strategy" meetings). Thorne's house is robbed at one point, and his colleagues at another station are only able to find the thief because he hasn't been able to sell Thorne's extensive collection of country music CDs, which is the cue for a riff on the musical tastes of several characters.
Importantly, though, Billingham is able to dial back on the comedy when needed as well. Thorne's relationship with his father is a difficult one, and it's clearly complicated by the latter's dementia. There are some brilliantly-drawn scenes involving the two men as the younger comes to terms with the "new reality" of his father's decline.

Of course, the murder of the sex offender isn't the only one in this case, and more victims pile up quite effectively - with a few brief scenes from the perspective of one of them being most effective. Again, these are not men that people tend to feel remorse over the deaths of, and this continues to challenge some of the investigators - as do the all-too-frequent dead ends in the investigation.

It's here where Billingham - who, we must remember, was writing only his third novel at the time - has a little difficulty keeping all the balls in the air at once. We've been treated to little vignettes of a nameless couple coming to terms with a seemingly violent rape, as well as the scenes showing the victims-to-be, as mentioned earlier, but we're suddenly introduced to a middle-aged former policewoman being recruited into a "cold case" review team and following up leads on a seemingly-unrelated matter.
Eventually, all of these threads converge, and Thorne is given a new reason to investigate what has now become a serial killer case. There's slightly too high a level of coincidence in all of this for mine, although Billingham does a respectable job of explaining how it all works out the way it needs to.

The final revelations, while genuinely impressive, were ones I'd been suspecting for roughly the last 100 pages, due (of all things) to another vignette which Billingham inserted to dramatise the appearance of one of the victims. That said, this is the only instance in the Thorne series I'm aware of in which victory is snatched so dramatically from the jaws of defeat, even though there's still a reasonable level of coincidence involved and (in retrospect) some rather heavy-handed foreshadowing.

This isn't exactly "light reading", as sexual violence is never far from the surface of the plot. The plot, too, doesn't always move at the cracking pace that Billingham has made his stock-in-trade over his career, but again this is a third novel and may well demonstrate a writer still feeling his way forward a bit. The trademark Billingham humour and twisted mind, though, are both very readily apparent.

A worthy entry in the Thorne series. 4 stars.