Canongate, 2024, 334 p, including 2 p Acknowledgements.

“The reception area had been designed with an eye to vomit and violence.” Thus begins this book, which if you hadn’t already known this was a crime novel would certainly have alerted you instantly.

Jim Brennan is the son of a minor criminal who managed to evade a life of petty crime and has worked himself up to the position of vice-Chancellor at the Universty. He has lived comfortably with his wife Maggie and children Eliot and Sarah till his existence is turned upside down by Eliot’s arrest for possessing drugs with the intention to deal. This drags him into the shady world he thought he had left behind as he finds himself having to dance to the tune of the gangsters to whom Eliot owes a large amount of money, all while navigating the problems of his work – a student who has committed suicide, the University’s possibly compromising connections with China, the Principal’s impending retiral, a Physics professor’s antipathy and the overseeing of granting of contracts for new buildings.

This odyssey into the darker side of life leads him into contact with Eddie Cranston, now a low-grade criminal lawyer with a sideline in helping youths to stay out of trouble, a property developer called Henders, an ex-student named Becca and – eventually – with one of his father’s old sparring partners.

In a conversation with Henders he contrasts the change in attitudes over his life by saying, “‘My dad was a low-grade hardman. An occasional enforcer with what we’d now call anger management issues. Back in the day folk just said he was mental.’”

There is, though, really only one incidence of violence in the book – which occurs offstage – and also a death in the climactic scene, but on the whole the novel doesn’t actually deliver on the threat of that opening line. Not that that’s a bad thing.

As a portrait of a man caught on the horns of a prickly dilemma it is entertaining enough with Welsh’s typical good writing and convincing characterisation.

Pedant’s corner:- “on the brew” (usually rendered as ‘on the broo’; from burroo, a west of Scotland corruption of bureau, itself short for Employment Bureau, the precursor of Job Centres,) “breath smelt of fruit pastels” (fruit pastilles,) “an urge to hoick and spit” (to hawk and spit,) “wedding band” (is a USianism, the British is always wedding ring, which was used five lines later, so maybe this was to avoid quick repetition,) Henders’ (several times; Henders’s,) “hung themselves in despair” (hanged themselves.) “He got to his feet, ending indicating the meeting was over” (either ‘He got to his feet, ending the meeting’, or, He got to his feet, indicating the meeting was over’,) “made it barely seemed to matter” (made it barely seem to matter,) “before he hung himself” (hanged himself,) “Rowan was on her knees in the kitchen, cleaning the oven, when Jim entered the kitchen” (doesn’t need two mentions of the kitchen.) “A barbers manned by …” (A barber’s,) “that another pair of eyes were observing him” (another pair … was observing him.) “A crowd of students were streaming down the hill” (a crowd  … was streaming.) In the acknowledgements; “Writing a books is nice work if you can get it” (either ‘Writing a book’ or, ‘Writing books’.)

Penguin, 1993, 637 p

Richard Papen was brought up in Plano in California, a place he regards as a backwater. Nevertheless, he has made it to an elite college at Hampden in Vermont. His parents were not well off and he feels the contrast between himself and other students there. At first he tries not to be found out, but such things are hard to disguise. After originally being turned down as student of Greek by its professor Julian, Richard comes into the orbit of his rather small and close-knit class cohort, Francis, Henry, Edmond (known as Bunny,) and twins Charles and Camilla. (Those last two names perhaps now have more of a frisson than they would have had when Tartt wrote the book.) Richard overhears the five arguing about a Greek translation and provides them with a neat solution which encourages them to petition Julian to accept him.

Though Julian is perhaps unorthodox as a teacher – certainly in his attitude to assessments -his reputation as being charismatic is not actually reflected in the text, where he almost seems a nebulous presence, though he is instrumental in the plot unfolding.

Only a few instances are given where Julian’s personality comes through. When struck with the thought that Bunny, due to his girlfriend Marion being Presbyterian, might be about to turn to religion Julian opines, “‘Well whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.’”

So far, so campus novel; but an exchange in one of Julian’s classes foreshadows later events.

Julian says, “‘We think we have many desires but in fact we only have one. What is it?’”

‘To live,’ said Camilla.

‘To live forever,’ said Bunny.”

A sentiment like that is always a hostage to fortune, whoever utters it.

Richard is not yet fully part of the group when the incident upon which the whole structure rests takes place; a Dionysian Bacchanal at which neither Richard nor Bunny was present where the invocation of the god actually happened – or the other four believed it did, which is the same thing. During their drug induced stravaiging a neighbouring farmer was accidentally killed. Richard learns this only later but Bunny saw the blood-soaked aftermath and did not quite believe their story of running over a deer.

Bunny is a bit of a loose cannon, leaching off anyone he can but most often Henry, of whom he says to Richard, “‘I think he’s got a little bit of Jew blood.’” The incident makes his behaviour worse. At one point Henry’s refusal to indulge him provokes the outburst, “‘You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew.’” How representative this is of the attitudes of attendees of elite US colleges in the time portrayed I don’t know but perhaps they may still be common.

The group’s growing fear of Bunny’s possible betrayal of their secret, complicated by the convoluted relationships between Francis and Charles, Charles and Camilla and Camilla and Henry, and Richard’s unrequited feelings for Camilla is drastic, irrevocable and only creates further tensions between them.

The book received a lot of praise and became a best seller. While being well enough written it is also about one third as long as it needs to be. The author might argue she was providing space to develop character but that could still have been done more economically. Moreover, nearly all of the characters are unsympathetic and morally bankrupt to a greater or lesser degree. Though maybe this is true of elite US college alumni/alumnae in general. Even viewpoint character Richard is weak and easily swayed.

It’s not encouraged me to to read anything else by Tartt.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of dialogue (x 2,) – and at its end (x 1.) “‘If I’d of been’” (‘If I’d have been’; or, ‘If I’d’ve been’ – but it was in dialogue,) “it was the epicenter” [sic] – despite this being a British publication the text is in USian – (not ‘it was off centre’, just ‘it was the centre’,) “littered like a fairgrounds” (like a fairground. Is “fairgrounds” USian?) Gladiola (Gladioli.) “None of his things were gone” (None of his things was gone,) organdy (organdie,) a cat is first referred to as she but later as he.

Pushkin Vertigo, 2024, 405 p.

Alison McCoist has been all but shunned in Glasgow’s police after she made a mistake in believing the confession of a man called Knightley to the murder of a young pregnant woman. The real culprit remains at large and DI McCoist – who has enough on her plate already what with her name being similar to a well-known former footballer (‘I’ve heard all the jokes already’) and only seeing her twin children under access conditions at weekends – is as a result widely thought to be on the take.

In parental terms Davey Burnet is in the same boat as Alison. His estranged wife Sarah is seeking an order to prevent him seeing his four-year-old daughter Annalee. His job at Sean’s carwash does not pay well and he has problems with booze.

When Paul McGuinn turns up in an expensive car asking for it to be cleaned – of evidence of his extra-marital exploits – Davey and would-be law student Tim do too good a job. McGuinn keeps returning.

Meanwhile DI McCoist is working away in the background trying to redeem her reputation. Her attention is drawn to the carwash by a complaint from a female customer who left her child in the back seat to go shopping while her car was being cleaned and was subjected to abuse and threats by Sean when she came back.

One day Davey mistakes the date of his child access hearing and when reminded of it by his mother panics into taking McGuinn’s car to try to make it on time. He is blocked in on the way, and kidnapped. People out to get McGuinn – a local crime boss into trafficking, prostitution, and with a yen for violence – have made a mistake. As a harmless innocent they let Davey go and burn the car. But Davey’s error has delivered both himself and the carwash business as a whole into McGuinn’s hands. Soon all sorts of clean-up jobs, most of them grisly, fall Davey’s way.

There is a sticker on the front cover saying this won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. I thought it was all right, diverting enough but not especially notable in terms of crime fiction. It did have a strong sprinkling of Glaswegian dialect. For my taste there was too much violence but I suspect crime readers would not be displeased by that.

Oh, and despite the foregrounding of the detective in most of the commentary/reviews of Squeaky Clean I have seen this is actually Davey Burnet’s story not Alison McCoist’s.

Pedant’s corner:- on the back cover “half the Glasgow copshop think DI Alison McCoist is bent” (half the Glasgow copshop thinks ….,) bicky/bickies (biccy/biccies,) gyprock (several times. That building material’s proprietary name is Gyproc,) “next him” (next to him.) “Dannie’s Gibb’s body” (Dannie Gibbs’s,) sprung (sprang,) “dove in” (dived in,) “a twitching bag of ticks” (of tics,) epicentres (centres,) “pouring out a gash on her forehead” (pouring out of a gash,) staunch (stanch.)

Canongate, 2022, 373 p, including 3 p Afterword.

This one was published twenty years after Welsh’s first novel The Cutting Room and in it she returns to the central character of that book, Rilke, an auctioneer for the financially troubled Bowery Auctions. Rilke is gay and the intervening years gives Welsh, through Rilke, the opportunity to comment on the evolution in attitudes towards homosexuality that has taken place in that time. (Some prejudice still appears here but on the whole the other characters – even those he is meeting for the first time – by and large accept who and what he is.)

This starts from the first scene where Rilke is attending the wedding of the two Bobbys, where the parents of one of the two grooms were never to be mentioned. Rilke has to escort one of the guests, Jojo, out of the reception to avoid the possibility of a scene. Jojo gives Rilke a tip about the wind-up of an estate at Ballantyne House in Dumfries and Galloway whose owners are looking to sell off the house contents, a commission which might save Bowery Auctions’ somewhat failing fortunes. The next day Jojo is found dead in an alley.

As Rilke delves into the circumstances of the death via Jojo’s lodger, an art student calling himself Sands, he gets embroiled with gangster Jamie Mitchell and encounters a strange situation regarding the affairs at Ballantyne House and farm, where there was a car crash a week or so before and the auction crew rescue a frightened Vietnamese refugee, Phan, on a nearby road.

Welsh is always on top of her material here and interweaves her plot intricately. We are almost incidentally given glimpses of the more outré aspects of Glasgow’s gay scene.

Her talent for characterisation is illustrated by the on-off relationship between the auction house’s owner, Rose, and police Inspector Jim Anderson. There was the neat observation, “He had slicked his wet hair back from his face, like Brian Ferry before the cardigans set in.”

This doesn’t quite reach the levels which The Cutting Room did, but it is still a very good piece of crime fiction. A cut above you might say.

Pedant’s corner:- Burns’ (Burns’s,) “the frail women’s exit” (frail woman’s,) “a pair of storm doors” (on the top floor of a tenement? Storm doors are external. I think Welsh meant ‘vestibule doors’,) Sands’ (many times; Sands’s,) “black surplice” (on a minister at a funeral. Surplices are traditionally white and can be worn at funerals. If they’re black they’re most likely not a surplice but an ecclesiastical gown.) “Rose looked out of place the lady of the house” (needs a comma between ‘place’ and ‘the lady’,) “aren’t I?” (The speaker was a Scot. We say ‘amn’t I?’) “a group of youths were huddled” (a group … was huddled,) “people who never had no luck at all” (the sense demands ‘people who never had luck at all’,) “Sand’s said” (Sands said,) “some bullets” (these were for a shotgun, which traditionally is loaded with cartridges, not bullets. As indeed this shotgun was, later,) “let off three quick shots” ([again traditionally] shotguns can fire only twice before needing reloaded,) distributer (distributor.)

Polygon, 2019, 281 p.

The book’s title perhaps says it all – there are murders, some scenes are set in Glasgow’s Merchant City – but is a trifle misleading. The action centres not on the Merchant City itself but on the so-called Merchant City Health Centre, a massage parlour – and an establishment with all the connotations that description of a business inevitably invokes. This is staffed by women in white coats – at least until they take them off to get down to offering extras. The most important of these to the plot are the beautiful Miranda, with the beaming smile and that way of saying, “How are you?” to her regulars, no nonsense up-front Claudia, the conventionally attractive Candy, the more homely in style Annette, and new girl Justine.

The narrative is mainly double stranded, Annette, from whose viewpoint we see the goings-on in the brothel (let’s not mince words,) and barman Jack who is resorting to paying for his sexual pleasures after his wife left him some time ago. There are also chapters from the murderer’s viewpoint, outlining his modus operandi. A psychologist later on suggests that because the victims are all men the murderer is in fact a woman but the treatment of his contribution leaves little doubt that view is a red herring.

The first victim was one of the Health Centre’s clients but that could have been coincidence. When the second also turns out to be a patron Annette in particular feels they ought to contact the police but Edna at front of house does not want to attract their attention. But it comes anyway. There are subplots involving the proprietor of a free newspaper who wants to rid Glasgow of “havens of vice” and a client of the Health Centre who beats up one of the sex-workers. (The revenge Claudia takes on him is well deserved and condign.)

Murder in the Merchant City does not have as many amusing moments as McAllister’s previous Glasgow murder novel Close Quarters, possibly because its contents do not range about Glasgow’s West End quite so much. Its characters are well enough rounded, though some occupy the novel as representatives of types and perhaps Annette comes a bit too close to the designation “whore with a heart of gold.” Her motives are sound and reflect well on her.

It’s an enjoyable enough read and comes as close to a “cosy crime” novel as any modern example of the genre.

Pedant’s corner:- “none of the other girls were using it” (none …. was using it.)

Canongate, 2021, 284 p.

This is an originally unfinished draft left among his papers when McIlvanney died in 2015 and which was subsequently brought to completion by Ian Rankin. The cover tells us that the novel describes “Laidlaw’s First Case” but there is ample evidence in the text that he had previous investigation experience.

Protagonist DC Jack Laidlaw was McIlvanney’s gift to Scottish crime fiction as his novel Laidlaw is credited with inspiring later authors of what has come to be known as tartan noir. One of these writers is, of course, Ian Rankin. Two more Laidlaw novels, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties appeared at intervals of six and eight years after Laidlaw.

The Dark Remains unfolds over six days of the investigation in October 1972 after Lawyer Bobby Carter is found dead in an alley in a surprising part of town. He was the right-hand man of gangster Cam Colvin and the circumstances and location of the body point to the involvement of Colvin’s rival gang boss John Rhodes but the supposed murder weapon is found near the home of one of Colvin’s associates. As a result an outbreak of gang warfare seems imminent.

Many of the aspects of the police novel that have become familiar over the years are present here. Laidlaw’s boss DI Milligan is convinced from the outset that he knows who the culprit is but Laidlaw considers him an idiot and makes no bones about it. Laidlaw is a bit of a lone wolf and something of a loose cannon in terms of how he operates and his home life isn’t straightforward.

Society’s attitudes and habits have changed since 1972. Laidlaw’s smoking habit is noticeable now in a way it perhaps would not have been to a reader then. The position of women as adjuncts to the men, or only as objects of desire, also stands out.

I found the earlier parts of the book to be more compelling and the ending, when it came, seemed to be a tad rushed.

Pedant’s corner:- “a note indicated that that the identikit” (omit one ‘that’,) “outside of” (just outside, no ‘of’,) Chambers’ (Chambers’s,) Menzies’ (Menzies’s.)

On Monday myself and the good lady had an emotional day when we said our final goodbye to Eric Brown, Science Fiction writer, crime novelist, devoted husband and father, a dear friend, a gentle man and gentleman.

He had an interesting life which took in his origins in Haworth, Yorkshire, and a sojourn in Australia before returning to his Yorkshire roots then visiting India without first ever having tasted a curry. He soon learned to cook curries from scratch and was a devotee of that food from then on. He also spent some time in Greece. All of these influences fed into his fiction.

After his marriage to Finn they moved to Cambridgeshire before, with their beloved daughter Freya, coming up to Scotland to live in Berwickshire.

I first met Eric at a Science Fiction convention and immediately recognised him as one of nature’s good guys. It wasn’t until the move to Scotland that we were able to have extended conversations with him, though he and I had been emailing each other for a long time. In his emails he frequently would note a particularly good performance by Sons while usually bemoaning how Leeds United had fared. Football, SF and literature (probably in that order) were our perennial talking points, though the conversation would roam far and wide.

He always sought out a good curry house and would be disappointed when the fare wasn’t to his liking. I remember he told us a story about a meal in a curry restaurant in Dunbar where he said to the owner afterwards that it had not been formulated properly – only to receive the reply that that was how their patrons liked it. A year or so later he went to the same establishment to try to obtain for one of his own curries an ingredient which he had run out of. The owner was surprised Eric cooked his own curries and, being short of a chef, immediately offered him a job! Eric refused, no doubt courteously.

Eric sometimes solicited from me my comments on a story or novel he had not yet submitted to a publisher and never moaned at my nit-picking. He also took with very good grace my irritation at the use of the ‘time interval later’ turn of phrase.

(Edited to add: this was such a difficult post to write I knew I would miss out something. I had intended to say that the good lady and myself felt incredibly honoured when Eric dedicated one of his books to us.)

Eric, it was an absolute privilege to know you and call you friend. I still cannot bring myself to believe you have gone and that those emails will no longer drop into my in-box.

Eric Brown: 24/5/1960 – 21/3/2023. Much missed.

John Murray, 2015, 380 p.

This is the second in Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy (see here for my review of the first) written pre-Covid. To read it in the midst of a pandemic is odd but the similarities are outweighed by the differences. “The sweats” is at once both more virulent but more forgiving than Covid. Those who die succumb quickly, those who survive do not experience lingering symptoms.

Avoiding the usual hazard of middle books of three Welsh cleverly has a different viewpoint character from A Lovely Way to Burn. This is Magnus McFall, sometime comedian, who witnesses the first manifestations of “the sweats” while playing down the bill to a much more successful comic. His reflection that “London had not closed for the Blitz, the IRA, or al-Qaeda. It would take more than a few germs to shut down the city” is of course not borne out by our own pandemic experience.

On his way home after a gig he prevents the rape of a girl but is himself mistaken for the rapist and so finds himself in jail awaiting trial. Not a good place to be at the outset of a pandemic. When his cellmate dies he is placed in with Jeb who is in the sex offenders wing and garb. It later transpires Jeb is in solitary because he was a policeman found guilty of murdering the woman whom he had a relationship with on an undercover assignment.

Their breakout of jail is brutal – not least to other inmates – and they make their way into the country on motor bikes using back roads, with Magnus aiming to return to his home in Orkney. Several close encounters ensue before the pair end up at Tanqueray Hall, a big house containing a small religious group led by the elderly Father Wingate. We have here almost the perfect closed community, the setting for many a crime story. And the murders have already started.

The breakdown of civil life is a staple of apocalyptic tales, as is attempts to restore order by harsh actions. To a certain kind of mind catastrophes are soon latched on to as a manifestation of God’s punishment for wickedness. The ideas that a Supreme Being could be benevolent and that disasters can occur to the innocent, are beyond that mind set. The fact of survival is no guarantee of innate goodness, and it can of itself unhinge the survivor.

Character is a tricky aspect of the post-apocalypse tale. Norms of behaviour may change as a result of the event, but some human constants will remain so. Welsh’s scenario is the classic one of the SF so-called ‘cosy’ catastrophe, albeit with a modern twist and an added dash of crime (which itself is a concept liable to undergo change in the aftermath.) There are inevitable echoes of John Christopher in Death is a Welcome Guest even if Welsh has never read him (though I suspect she has.) She certainly knows how to keep the reader turning the pages. It remains to be seen whether in the third of the trilogy the expectations of that sub-genre are fulfilled.

Pedant’s corner:- “(how many hours ago?).” (that full stop after the bracket is unnecessary. The question mark acts as a marker for the end of the sentence.) “A series of tabloid headlines were riffling through Magnus’s mind” (A series was riffling. Extra points for ‘Magnus’s’ though.) “Wylie Coyote” (that cartoon character is Wile E Coyote,) “vodka and tonics” (tonic is an adjective here so cannot be made plural; ‘vodkas and tonic’, or ‘vodkas with tonic,) snuck (sneaked. Please,) “hooching with them” (usually spelled ‘hoaching’ or sometimes ‘hoatching’,) staunch (stanch.)

Harper, 2009, 363 p.

This is not my normal reading fare but the good lady knew I’d recently read Jane Austen’s Emma and wondered how I’d react to this author’s take on the characters from that book. Hill is the creator of the detective duo Dalziel and Pascoe about whom he has written twenty-four books. This is a collection of his shorter works and was originally published in 1987. That “Featuring Dalziel and Pascoe” is emblazoned on the front cover is a bit of a cheek. Only one of the six stories here does so and that tangentially at best. Also irritating is that all the story titles are rendered entirely in lower case.

there are no ghosts in the soviet union is a detective tale featuring Inspector Lev Chislenko. (I admit that my first thought with that name was of the famous Igor who played for Dynamo. Being questioned whether he is related to that footballer becomes a running joke through the piece.) Chislenko has been called in to resolve the case of a man being pushed into a lift and immediately falling through the floor, which remains as solid as it always was and there is no trace of him at the foot of the shaft. The obvious explanation is that the man was a ghost. Consequently ideological considerations beset Chislenko. “There are no ghosts in the Soviet Union,” is apparently the set-up line to a Soviet joke but also an assertion that he must find a way to uphold. The story is obviously intended as a satire on the Soviet Union – or at least on how Hill imagined the Soviet Union to be – but is equally applicable to any authoritarian regime anywhere. The resolution depends on Chislenko’s delving into the lift’s origins. It was manufactured in Chemnitz (renamed Karl-Marx Stadt after World War 2) in the 1920s and installed in a now demolished building elsewhere before being re-used in a money skimming scam. His investigations also bring him into dangerous contact with powerful figures in Soviet circles.

In bring back the cat! Joe Sixsmith is a balding West Indian (with a balding jacket) who has just begun his career as a private detective. He is called in by a Mrs Ellison to find her cat which has been missing for three weeks. In the course of his investigations all over one afternoon, he uncovers various family secrets and solves another case entirely, thus making his name. There’s an overt consciousness of racism to some of the exchanges. (Sixsmith was later to become the protagonist of another series of Hill’s books.)

the bull ring is set in the British military training camp at Étaples during the Great War. One of the instructors is excessively harsh on recruit Harry. For Harry’s own good he would say; but Harry doesn’t see it that way.

Dalziel and Pascoe do not appear as such in auteur theory. It is the actors who are playing them on a film set who do. The one playing Pascoe has long been on the way down as an actor and is now saddled with a tyro leading lady who is the director’s new wife. It also includes the bearded writer of the novel which is being filmed (we are, I suppose, meant to assume Hill is writing about himself,) who is becoming more and more annoyed at changes to the script. The story starts with a warning injunction, Nothing in this story is what it seems. You should remember that. The metafictional games in it do not lift it above the category ‘diverting’.

poor emma takes up twenty or so years after Jane Austen left off her tale of Emma Woodhouse and her misguided attempts at match-making. The intervening years have not been kind, though Mr Woodhouse continues, like a creaky gate, to, as we Scots say, “hing lang”. Mr Weston has died and his widow, in a sentence carved from early nineteenth century attitudes and would-be Austen impersonation “eventually declined into religion, to such an extent that it came as no surprise, though an incalculable shock to most decent people, when she embraced the doctrines of Rome.” Mr Knightley has neglected his affairs, indulging himself as a bon vivant and taken up a seat in Parliament (which allows him various other indulgences.) His brother John has lost the confidence of his legal clients and now runs Donwell Abbey on George’s behalf. The conflict comes from the wishes of both to protect that inheritance. All the main characters from Emma reappear, save Jane Fairfax, except for mention of her death. Her husband Mr Frank Churchill is involved in the dénouement. The Mr Knightley shown here is far removed from the one Austen portrayed and so too is Emma herself as she indulges in an action which that younger self would surely never have contemplated but which does have the effect of giving the tale a condign ending.

crowded hour concerns the invasion into her home by two armed men of a woman whose husband is somewhat obscurely rich and has absences from home. It begins, “At twelve noon there were three people in that house. By the time the clock struck one, two of them would be dead and the life of the third would have changed for ever.” The story lies in the journey that beginning implies.

Pedant’s corner:- “led him out in to” (into,) humourously (humorously,) “‘How’s you mother?’” (your,) smidgeon (smidgin; or, smidgen,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “his legal practise” (the noun is practice, as used later, I note,) “a codicillary convenant” (covenant, surely?) “had showed” (this may have been an attempt at Austenism; ‘had shown’.)

Doubleday, 2019, 363 p.

The title on the cover of this is preceded by the words “A Jackson Brodie novel.” After her initial success with Behind the Scenes at the Museum, followed by two less well received novels (one of which I reviewed here) Atkinson went on to write four novels featuring her private detective of that name. She then embarked on technically accomplished (and more ambitious) novels dealing with the fallout from World War 2 in A God in Ruins, Life After Life and Transcription.

The action here revolves around towns on the Yorkshire coast in the area of Whitby and Scarborough, the hangover from the activities of two since-jailed local child abuse abetters called Bassani and Carmody, and the present-day sex-trafficking partnership of a group of golfing friends.

Oh, and there’s a murder. That, though, is resolved off-stage and does not impinge much on proceedings.

Big Sky has at least ten viewpoint characters and its chapters tend to be short – sometimes with very short sections within them from some of those different viewpoints. All this conspires to make the experience of reading Big Sky bitty.

There was something about the writing here that I found a little off. A misjudgement of tone, (female detectives named Ronnie Dubicki and Reggie Chase. Detectives called Ronnie and Reggie. Seriously?) unnecessary repetitions of phrases – though perhaps some of this was to imply Vince Ives was protesting too much – and intersecting timelines which were not well handled so that we saw the same scene’s events repeated very soon after their first appearance but with very little difference in the reader’s sense of what had occurred. Combined with the occasional descent into cliché this gave the impression, to this one anyway, that Atkinson was writing down to her readers.

This is no A God in Ruins nor a Life After Life, nor a Transcription even, but perhaps after her achievements in those books Atkinson needed a rest – or to have some fun. She overdid it though.

Pedant’s corner:- On a visit to a museum Brodie tells his son Captain Cook was the ‘first man to sail around the world.’ (No. That would be members of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition [Magellan himself did not survive the journey.]) Croyden (Croydon?) “she had strived hard” (striven,) “he’d compèred Saturday Night at the London Palladium (Sunday Night surely?) “It was a raucous lot that were in tonight” (that was in,) crack cocaine is implied to have been a drug widespread in the 1970s, (it wasn’t till the 80s) focussing (focusing.) “None of them were” (none of them was,) Mellors’ (several times, Mellors’s,) “his act finished on such a crescendo” (such a climax.) The remains of a handsome sunset was still staining the sky” (the remains … were still staining,) a missing full stop. “With his luck he would bob around till the lifeboat found him or a stray fishing vessel” (has its syntax awry; why would a lifeboat find a stray fishing vessel? Try instead, ‘till the lifeboat or a stray fishing vessel found him’,) staunch (stanch,) focussed (focused,) “the news’ afterburn” (the news’s,) staunched (stanched,) “where a cluster of bridesmaids … were waiting for them” (where a cluster …. was waiting.)