The Grave Tattoo
by Val McDermid
HarperCollins, £17.99
King of the Road
by Charlie Williams
Serpent’s Tail, £7.99; 320pp
Pardonable Lies
by Jacqueline Winspear
John Murray, £12.99
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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH and Fletcher Christian, the mutineer on the Bounty, were born in the same town in the Lake District, Cockermouth, and went to school there. From that fact, and the persistent theory that Christian had not died and been buried on Pitcairn Island, as generally believed, but had secretly returned to Britain, Val McDermid has woven an absorbing modern mystery.
The Grave Tattoo starts with the discovery of a body, tattooed in the style of seamen of two centuries ago. Could it be that of Christian? Jane Gresham, impecunious but passionate Wordsworth scholar, thinks it possible, and is interested for another reason.
She believes that the poet and the mutineer met on Christian’s return, that Wordsworth was privy to the truth about the mutiny, and that he had written a long poem as a result, the manuscript of which has not been found.
It would be worth a fortune. She suspects that it might have been handed down to the descendants of Wordsworth’s maidservant and she travels back to the Lake District — sinister rather than postcardy pretty. Her attempts to trace it are met with hostility and accompanied by a series of suspicious deaths, culminating in threats to her own life. McDermid’s mix of historical and literary clues with modern detection is handled with panache.
Royston Blake is a boastful, aggressive, foul-mouthed, psychopathic hard-man of the utmost political incorrectness, a failure at everything he does but an indomitable believer in his own cleverness and sex appeal. He’s also a careless multiple killer (though insistent that it was never his fault). In short, a thoroughly unpleasant and dislikeable character.
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Why, then — this is a great mystery — is it so enjoyable to read about him? Charlie Williams’s King of the Road is the last of the “Mangel trilogy”, named after the soul-less, run-down Midlands town that is Blake’s home. (I recommend reading the other two, Deadfolk and Fags and Lager, first).
In the latest, Blake, just released after four years in a psychiatric hospital, returns to Mangel to find it even more depressing than before. Mayhem and chaos accompanies him everywhere and I won’t attempt to summarise the convoluted, farcical plot, in which he falls in yet again with a troupe of dodgy villains.
Maisie Dobbs and her milieu could not be more different. Jacqueline Winspear’s Pardonable Lies is set in London in 1930, among the well-heeled and the aristos.
Dobbs is a psychologist and private investigator, attractive, desirable and stylish but touched with sadness; her experiences during the First World War have continued to haunt her. A famous QC hires her to confirm that his aviator son did indeed die in an air crash in France during the war; her close friend asks her to look into another wartime death. Inquiries lead her to unexpected results and danger.
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Next week in Books: Val McDermid on writing The Grave Tattoo