EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Simon Mason on THE BROKEN SHORE and TRUTH by Peter Temple

"As rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror ..."

Simon Mason is a writer of fiction. At first he wrote books for adults, then books for children, which grew up at roughly the same rate as his own children, and now he is back writing books for adults again.

His latest books are crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford. The first, A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) was a Sunday Times crime book of the month, and so was the second, The Broken Afternoon. The third, Lost and Never Found, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. 

He has pursued a parallel career as a publisher. From 2012 to 2018 he was Managing Director of the children’s publisher, David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, whose book of essays Daemon Voices (2016), he edited.

Arriving on the scene late (he was fifty when his first book was published), Peter Temple was instantly a writer of thoroughly expert literary thrillers, stylish, intelligent, humorous and dark. Words were important to him, his sprightly, stylish prose reminiscent of Chandler, but funnier (‘Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish’). The real world was important too; a former journalist, he knew how things work – newspapers, information-gathering agencies, politics – and also how the past lives in the present: ‘the past had suckers, it attached itself to everything.’ His characters, like those of Dickens, are vivid animations, distinguished by the marks of their individuality; his speciality was in damaged men. Scene-setting is always vivid and deeply felt, in particular of Temple’s adored-abhorred Melbourne, with its industrial lots, big-business office complexes, weatherboard slums and gated mansions. And all these literary virtues combine in his two last, loosely connected novels, The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2009), which outgrew his chosen genre.

The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.

Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.

Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?

Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.

It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.

The Broken Shore and Truth are published by Riverrun.

See also Linda Newbery's review of Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman

A FATAL INVERSION by Barbara Vine reviewed by Linda Newbery

"Not only does Barbara Vine keep you hooked; she makes you feel complicit, caught up in the same tightening mesh as her characters ..."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. 

I'd planned to review something else today, but because of the recent heatwave I'm revisiting, instead, my favourite Barbara Vine novel, which takes place during the exceptionally hot summer of 1976.

The TV adaptation in 1992, in which the young Jeremy Northam played one of the leads, introduced me to Ruth Rendell as her Barbara Vine alias. The novels written under this pseudonym are notable for their creeping sense of menace, and the way in which ordinary, not particularly ill-intentioned people become involved in terrible events through their circumstances or obsessions. If you start on a Barbara Vine, you'd better have plenty of time at your disposal; she will soon have you thoroughly hooked. Even on a re-reading, knowing the main thrust of the plot and the breathtaking twist at the end, I couldn't put this one down.

Unremitting summer heat contributes to a powerful sense of place and atmosphere. The 'inversion' of the title refers to Ecalpemos - some place in reverse - the name given by Adam, one of the viewpoint characters, to Wyvis Hall, the Suffolk mansion he unexpectedly inherits from a grumpy uncle. Intending just to visit and take stock of the place before heading to Greece for the summer, he and a friend, Rufus, decide to stay there in secret. The slightly shabby mansion, its lake and grounds and woodland, seem cut off from ordinary life; the 'drift', the long avenue leading in from the public road, marks this separation. We experience the place as the young men do, freed from studies and parental expectations, with no one to please but themselves: "He and Rufus, like sultans, had reclined on quilts and smoked hashish, the pungent trails of smoke rising into the dark air and mingling with the scents of the summer night"; and also as Adam views it later, remembering that Shiva, who joins them, called it Eden: "as if a necessary condition of being in this paradise was the commission of some frightful sin or crime that must result in expulsion."

The novel moves back and forth in time, starting ten years on from that summer. Burying a dead spaniel, the current owners of Wyvis Hall unearth human bones from the pet cemetery in their pine woods; inspection reveals these bones to have belonged to a young woman and a baby. When this gruesome find is reported in the press it unsettles, separately, Adam, Rufus, and Shiva, who have never met or communicated since the day they left in 1976. Each of them, knowing exactly what happened though with varying degrees of involvement, dreads further investigation. Both Adam and Rufus are now well-established professionals, Rufus a gynaecologist, Adam a computer designer; Rufus fears for his reputation, Adam for his marriage and his baby daughter. Approached by police, Adam unwisely denies having lived at Wyvis Hall that summer, a claim that can easily be disproved by a number of locals: the 'coypu man', the dismissed gardener, the post-girl.

Of course we don't at first know who the young woman might be, nor the baby, but possibilities unfurl as the 'commune' Adam needs to finance his hedonistic summer begins to assemble. There are girls; first Mary, Rufus's girlfriend, who soon leaves, then two casual pick-ups, and - the one on whom the plot hinges - Zosie, a childlike but sexily appealing waif brought back by Rufus and seemingly with nowhere else to go. Soon Zosie finds dubious ways of providing cash, and goes from being Rufus' lover to Adam's. The 'commune' is completed by Shiva and Vivien, brought there on the recommendation of a mutual friend, and expecting - Vivien especially - a place of spiritual enlightenment and practical self-sufficiency. Earnest, orderly and principled, seeking the stability missing from her childhood, Vivien soon takes charge of domestic arrangements, becoming a mother figure to Zosie.

As each of the three men reluctantly recalls the events of that hot summer, the tragedy unfolds for the reader with awful inevitability. I had forgotten many of the details from my earlier reading, but appreciated this time how cleverly everything is woven into the whole: the 'coypu man'; Vivien's blue dress; Zosie's small gold ring; Uncle Hilbert's shot-gun; Vivien's background in a care home that's resulted in her love of children and her career as a nanny. The hints and foreshadowings are all there, hidden in plain sight.

What Vine / Rendell does so successfully is to engross the reader in the lives of characters who aren't particularly likeable. Adam is careless of his good fortune, inconsiderate of others and casually racist towards Shiva, remembering him only as 'the Indian' despite sharing the house for several weeks. Rufus, a medical student, is ambitious and arrogant, treating young women as possessions: when Zosie appeals to him to take her side in a crisis, he responds: 'I'll tell you whose side I'm on. Rufus's. And that goes for always.' Zosie, vulnerable and dependent, frequently likened to a small, timid animal, is the one whose actions precipitate catastrophe. Even Shiva, anxious for respectability but too keen to win approval, contributes to the mounting disaster; years later he has confided in his wife, but kept this final secret to himself. All three viewpoint characters are tormented by guilt, remorse and the need for self-preservation, in various measures. Not only does Barbara Vine keep you hooked; she makes you feel complicit, caught up in the same tightening mesh as her characters, imagining that you're there in the kitchen on the fateful morning, sharing their dilemma.

Recently, I've read high-profile thrillers that depend on a major plot twist meant to snatch the rug from under the reader's feet. Without exception they have left me feeling dissatisfied, resenting the time I've invested in reading - the cleverness of the twist isn't enough to make up for thin characterisation, implausible motivation or a denouement that falls flat once the revelation has been made. Revisiting this darkly enthralling masterclass has reminded me just how good, how superbly good, Barbara Vine / Ruth Rendell was. That ending, so surprising, so absolutely right ... well, you'll have to read it for yourself, if you haven't already done so.

I haven't read all the Barbara Vine titles yet, but this one remains at the top of my list, with Asta's Book, The Brimstone Wedding and The Blood Doctor as runners-up. If you're a fan too, which is your favourite, and why?

A Fatal Inversion is published by Penguin.

This is an adapted version of a review which first appeared on my website blog, Between the Pages.