New crime fiction: revival of interest in traditional mysteries

Fifteen years ago, Raymond Chandler’s damning verdict on the traditional Golden Age mystery – “If it started out to be about real people, they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves” – was still pretty much taken for granted in crime writing circles, and writers who persisted in that mode were disparaged for writing “cosies’”.

Dashiell Hammett had taken murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley, and the hard boiled revolution led by these two men had an irrevocable influence on writers who believed crime fiction could and should be about more than “an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues”. (It should be said that a great deal of this critique was often heavily gendered: in his history of the genre, Bloody Murder, Julian Symons thought it sufficiently devastating to condemn Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers as “essentially a ‘women’s novel’”.)

But what is taken for granted changes, and the value of literary reputations can go up as well as down. It is in no small part due to the work of Martin Edwards that there has been a substantial revival of interest in traditional mystery fiction, a reappraisal of its merits and an exploration of the coded and often subversive ways in which it dealt with gender, sexuality and politics.

His comprehensive history The Golden Age of Murder made a spirited and erudite case for the defence, while his role as consultant on the British Library Crime Classics series has seen reprints of forgotten and neglected titles of the period finding new readers.

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Sexual frankness

Edwards is also a prolific crime novelist, and his latest book, Mortmain Hall (Head of Zeus, £18.99), is set in 1930, in the thick of the period he knows so well. Although there is a visit to a subterranean gay bar and more sexual frankness than would have been printable at the time, Edwards is not much interested in reimagining this terrain in greater psychological depth; rather, Mortmain Hall is a Gothic adventure story with a dashing female lead, Rachel Savernake, and a cast of colourful characters hitting their marks with precision and verve.

The complex plot turns around a series of miscarriages of justice, with rival bands of avengers and resounding echoes of Edgar Wallace’s Ringer and Four Just Men stories. Establishing the big house at the novel’s beginning and recounting the story in flashback might have given the early pages greater structural cohesion, but this is a diverting, page-turning entertainment.

Peter Swanson's Rules for Perfect Murders (Faber & Faber, £12.99) comes with a quote from Anthony Horowitz, and it is very much in the same meta-fictional mode as Horowitz's recent work. Mystery bookstore owner Malcolm Kershaw once posted a blog calledMy Eight Favourite Murders, a list that included Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James M Cain's Double Indemnity and Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders.

He is visited by FBI agent Gwen Mulvey because it appears that a killer is carrying out a series of murders based on the list – delightfully, she is led to Kershaw because his blog post is the first result of her Google searching The ABC Murders and Double Indemnity together. It all seems contrived and unlikely, but then we see Kershaw lying to Mulvey, and we find out his wife is dead, and he reveals that she left a journal but he’s not going to tell us everything that he discovered from reading it, and we are firmly in our unreliable narrator’s grip.

This is a propulsive read that manages the unusual feat of pulling off one startling plot twist after another while maintaining an entirely credible narrative intelligence. Lovingly evoked nostalgia for mystery bookstores and blog posts and the world before social media combines with astute observations about crime fiction, poetry and whiskey to make this dark, violent thriller a curiously comforting read.

Fictional reimagining

Joe Thomas has written a well-received series of novels set in São Paulo. Bent (Arcadia, £9.99) is a fictional reimagining of the rise and fall of SAS commando and CID detective Harold "Tanky" Challenor that tacks deftly between wartime Italy and the hard drinking nightclub London of Albert Dimes, Ronnie Knight and the Kray twins. The vividly rendered Soho scenes capture a culture transitioning from sharp-suited conformity to a more untrammeled era, giving rise to bands "playing rhythm and blues. Their first gig. Moody buggers. The singer looks like a bird. Rolling Stones, I believe they're called."

A stylish, atmospheric treat, Bent reads like an inspired blend of David Peace and early Pinter, with a nice line in brooding menace and perfectly pitched, faintly absurd dialogue:

“You got a pet? Pets are staunch.”

“They say he’s had a perm, this lad King, that’s what they say. A perm. What’s it coming to, eh, Peter?”

The Ruins (Repeater, £12.99) is Suede bass player Mat Osman's first novel, and what an expansively imagined, astonishingly beautiful piece of work it is.

In the aftermath of failed rock star Brandon Kussgarten’s murder, his estranged twin brother Adam is drawn into Brandon’s dark and duplicitous world at the behest of his widow: reforming the band, a possible comeback record, newly unearthed tapes of Brian Wilson’s legendary lost Smile album and a lavishly serviced hotel suite replete with recording equipment and all the drugs a human could possibly ingest.

Set during the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, with banks collapsing and flights grounded, The Ruins has an eerily prescient feel. Osman writes acutely about making music and being in a band, about creativity and identity and ego, and he has a way with a telling phrase: a drug dealer has “one of those faces you only really see in cities: so thoroughly international that it was almost a race in itself”; the hitherto ageless Brandon’s dead face suddenly showing its years: “Maybe this is how age comes at you when you’ve lived the life he had: all at once like the bill at the end of a meal”; Brandon snatching a smoke in “doorways that were more graffiti than wall”.

Redolent of The Talented Mr Ripley, Performance and Theodore Roszak’s Flicker, spanning London, LA and Las Vegas, The Ruins contains multitudes; it has all the makings of a cult classic.

Osman’s brother Richard has a debut coming later this year about which there has been a great deal of seven figure shouting; The Ruins made less noise, but I think it will stay the course.