Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
An up and coming actress, Gabriella Byrne, is run over not once, not twice but thrice in Regent’s Park. It happens almost outside the Gomorrahian Embassy – Yes seriously! – Gomorrah is apparently a recently oil rich state with apparently a Grand Vizier in control! No-one seems really to know who Gabriella Byrne really was, least of all the many thousands who followed her on-line oeuvre.
DI Kennedy and his team are tasked with tracking down the killer and are hampered by diplomatic immunity, a playboy ambassador and his son, cod-Irishmen, high level intrigue and forays into soft-porn movie making and there are frequent distractions in the shape of the DI’s developing love life with another up and coming actress – thankfully, the ever promised consummation is delayed until they very last line.
I initially took this for a ‘Golden Age’ type book — it isn’t, it’s set in present day
London, but it bears some comparison, with a nod to locked room mysteries and mysterious off-stage characters. One character has a Mrs Malaprop type problem with using the wrong words in conversation. Another has a verbal tic of repeating his sentences with ‘I say’ as a bridge, in the same way as ‘Foghorn Leghorn’. Add to this, a gay Home Secretary and his partner, who was at school with ‘Jonty’, the Gomorrah Grand Vizier, and there is a recipe for much ‘behind the scenes’ meddling.
There are plenty of semi-comic asides in this crime caper which made me think, albeit only slightly, of Christopher Fowler’s work with knowing asides and references to cultural milestones past and present. There are some real oddities, which I understand are authorial trademarks. A local journalist and former-flame of the DI is referred to with her name in lower case (with a nod to the singer k.d lang), but there are also numerous typos.
Overall this is, at base, quite a competent whodunit and I might well read some of the others but it has the sense of trying too hard to shoe-in all sorts of the above-mentioned oddities and more. Its bizarre aspects and irrelevancies make it rather, and possibly deliberately, unconvincing as a police procedural, even allowing for the fictitious Camden Town police station disregard for most modern police investigative processes and a pleasing obsession with tea and shortbread. It’s just really rather odd!
Neither fish nor fowl, but something different and perhaps more. This is the 11th outing for DI Christy Kennedy - D.I.C.K – geddit?
