Subscriber OnlyBooks

Crime fiction: An enthralling Southern Gothic and a drip-feed of revelations

New thrills from Lee Durkee, Jane Casey, Rahul Raina, Jo Spain and Karen Perry

Director Martin Scorsese as the Silhouette Watching Passenger, and Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, directed by Scorsese, 1976. Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Getty

Declan Burke's face
Declan Burke
Mon May 24 2021 - 06:00

One of the reasons for the crime novel’s popularity, or so the scholars assure us, is that fiction offers the illusion of the justice that is frequently denied to victims of crime in real life.

If that is the case, then Lou Bishoff, the anti-hero of Lee Durkee's The Last Taxi Driver (No Exit Press, £19.99), is the quintessential crime fiction hero, a cab driver who is "always trying to come up with theories that make life fair" as he ferries his customers around the dying town of Gentry, Mississippi. Not a criminal himself, nor a man particularly interested in the prevention of crime, Lou is a complex character, a UFO obsessive and former teacher of Shakespeare who is now "that rare beast, a Mississippi Buddhist".

But as he gets more and more involved in the lives of his passengers – meth-heads and dope dealers, sex addicts, rehab escapees and all manner of grotesques – as he works 12- to 15-hour shifts, Lou sinks deeper into the mire of Gentry (aka “Freakhole, Mississippi”), and gradually comes to resemble his taxi-driving antecedent, Travis Bickle, himself. Popping pills and fulminating about the dregs of society, yet incapable of not feeling compassion for the plight of his fellow bottom-feeders, Lou Bishoff represents a masterclass in characterisation, a man who recalls elements of Jim Thompson, Flannery O’Connor, Barry Gifford and John Kennedy Toole.

The result is an enthralling Southern Gothic that is the antithesis of the “schoolteacher noir” Lou rails against, and which offers much by way of sage wisdom besides: “Never for a moment forget,” Lou tells us, “that everyone is trying to murder you.”

READ MORE

Currently longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for The Cutting Place, which features her series protagonist Maeve Kerrigan, Jane Casey takes a step back from the police procedural for the standalone psychological thriller The Killing Kind (HarperCollins, £12.99).

The novel opens with London-based barrister Ingrid Lewis mourning the death of her colleague, who, having borrowed Ingrid’s umbrella, was knocked down in London traffic during heavy rain. But was it really an accident? And was Ingrid the intended victim? Ingrid has every right to feel paranoid: for years now her life has been plagued by John Webster, a former client who has been persecuting her ever since she got him acquitted of stalking another woman.

The scene is set for a tense cat-and-mouse tale, but Casey swiftly ups the ante: with the police reluctant to take her seriously when she claims she’s being targeted, Ingrid avails of John Webster’s unique skill-set to track down her latest stalker. It’s a bold twist on To Catch a Thief, and while the plot suffers a little from the genre’s reliance on an antagonist who is so well-resourced as to verge on supernatural, it’s also a fascinating exploration of what Ingrid describes as “an imbalance of power so familiar that it was almost invisible”.

Rahul Raina's How To Kidnap the Rich (Little, Brown, £14.99) isn't much cop as a how-to manual, and not least because the story opens with our hero, Ramesh, being abducted himself, along with the real target of the kidnapping, Rudraksh "Rudi" Saxena, India's hottest young TV star. How Ramesh, a "quasi-untouchable", comes to be moving in such a rarefied atmosphere provides the novel with its first half, when we learn that Ramesh, a self-styled "Educational Consultant", hauled himself out of a sinkhole of misery by becoming an "exam-taker" for the dim-witted sons of India's great and good, a practice that is illegal but not necessarily unusual given the country's endemic corruption. (India, Ramesh tells us, is "a country that has gone off, all the dreams having curdled and clumped like rancid paneer".)

What transpires is a blackly comic and deliberately crude satire on the values of modern India’s upwardly mobile middle-class, although Ramesh is impressively scattergun when it comes to lashing out: Americans, Europeans and the Chinese all take their lumps along with India’s social and political elite, as the ever-resourceful Ramesh lies, cheats and kidnaps his way up the greasy pole.

Jo Spain's latest thriller, The Perfect Lie (Quercus, £14.99), opens on Long Island in 2019, with the narrator, Erin Kennedy, enjoying a perfect morning with her police detective husband Danny, only for Danny to leap to his death from their fourth-floor apartment balcony when his colleagues in the Newport PD turn up at the front door.

Why did Danny jump? And how come, when the story flashes forward to December 2020, Erin is on trial for the murder of her husband? A Kafkaesque travesty of justice, the reader assumes, and especially when Spain references Alice in Wonderland to emphasise the surreal nature of Erin finding herself on trial for a murder she couldn’t have committed.

The truth about Danny’s death, however, is rather more prosaic and squalid, being linked – as Erin discovers when she starts to investigate after being stonewalled by Danny’s former colleagues – to a brutal assault on a young Harvard student, and its subsequent cover-up, some years before.

Braided together in flashbacks and flash-forwards, these three narrative strands deliver a drip-feed of revelations that work upon Erin like Chinese water torture, inexorably wearing away her illusions until all that remains is the defiance required to speak truth to power.

Opening "not long after the killing", Karen Perry's Stranger (Penguin Ireland, £7.99) is a slow-burning but gripping account of everyday tragedy, as Abi Holland narrates her family's gradual descent into obsession and murder that begins with the innocuous arrival of the French exchange student Corinne.

The gauche, pink-haired Corinne is “goofy”, according to Abi’s husband Mark, but she quickly becomes a cuckoo in the nest, offering an offbeat allure that beguiles Mark and his teenage daughter, Beth, in very different ways, even as she repels Beth’s more worldly older sister Eva. Set in an ostensibly “insulated suburbia”, this tale of teens with dark secrets and malevolent intentions recalls Megan Abbott’s novels. Corinne, Abi decides, has a “dark void inside her – a frightening emptiness”.

Even so, Stranger is by no means a straightforward account of an embryonic sociopath. Corinne proves a disruptive element, certainly, but the Holland family provides her with a fertile environment in which to wreak her mischief, and Perry does justice to every one of her flawed but fully rounded characters as the story accelerates towards an ending that is as bleak, bloody and inevitable as that of any Greek tragedy.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)