2007 reading challenge: book 2
Darkness In My Hand – Frederic Lindsay
This is the second Frederic Lindsay I have read and I wouldn’t have picked up either book if it was not for a fortuitous piece of library browsing. I came across Death Knock in April last year on the crime shelves and was attracted by the title – once a journalist, always a journalist, I suppose. That prompted me to seek out more of the series since it turned out to be one of the top ten books that I read during the year. Quite an accolade you might think for what is, at first glance, simply bog-standard crime fiction. Well, it happens that I am very fond of crime fiction. And I want to put down a few thoughts about what exactly has made the latest two books in this series such compelling reading.
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As far as I can see, there are two major reasons. Firstly, a really sure hand with the plotting. Death Knock uses a superb device whereby the reader is privy to significantly more information than the investigating team during a murder hunt involving a man found dead while dressed up as his wife. In this subsequent book DI Jim Meldrum, who is the series hero, awakes in an Edinburgh hotel to find himself hung over, apparently having slept with a strange woman and having been in quite a nasty fight if the bruises on his head, ribs and knuckles are anything to go by. Meldrum’s a big man so a fight of this magnitude is likely to have been rather serious for his opponent, whoever he was. What Meldrum doesn’t know then, but very quickly finds out, is that there’s the body of a murdered man in the next-door room. Has he been involved in the death? And how the hell did he wind up here in the first place?
Secondly, like some of the best practitioners in this genre (notably PD James), one of Lindsay’s major concerns is the psychological verisimilitude of his characters – not least his hero. So each (it appears to me after reading two of them, and also researching the subject a little bit further) is a essay in the effects on Jim Meldrum of his work as a detective and on the crimes, past, present and future, that he looks into. It’s almost a cliché to talk about an author transcending the boundaries of genre but I think that’s probably what’s happening here. Add to this a regionally very distinctive setting and a sure hand with dialogue and it’s a truly winning formula from an author that’s equally aware that the boundaries of a genre novel provide a challenging set of rules and requirements which can allow his greater concerns to flourish like a well-staked plant.
A footnote. While I was thinking about writing this I started looking for links on this author and got a bit irritated at how few were available, especially in terms of a Wikipedia article. So I wrote my own. Link below…
Some links: