A Place of Execution
After the dual onslaught of a depressingly high pile of term papers and some not-exactly-lightweight reading, my synapses felt the need for something...less challenging. While wandering through the local secondhand bookstore, I stumbled across Val McDermid's stand-alone mystery/thriller A Place of Execution, set in a remote English village in the early 1960s and the late 1990s. I'd heard many good things about McDermid, and the plot structure awakened the little grey cells (accustomed as they are to thinking about historical fiction), so I put down my $2.95.
A Place of Execution is actually a book-within-a-novel. Journalist Catherine Heathcote "authors" the first 2/3 of the narrative, which recounts a sensational rape-murder case from the early 1960s. Things fall apart in Book Two, however, with a handwritten note (reproduced in the text) from DCS George Bennett, the case's chief investigator and Heathcote's primary source. Bennett warns Heathcote that he now knows something that not only undermines the original verdict, but also has the potential to destroy the lives of several people with no direct connection to the case. His letter proves disruptive in more ways than one, since it is Book Two, Part Two--but comes out of chronological order, before Book Two, Part One. As one might expect, Heathcote soldiers on and discovers the Awful Truth.
I said I was out looking for something a little "less challenging," but to be honest, I think my definition of "less challenging" has long since deviated from common usage. Before I go further, let me say that this is a more-than-competent example of the British mystery in "glum" mode*, complete with decent plotting (although the 2/3-1/3 format ultimately feels top-heavy), a suitably Icky Bad Guy, and some Decent but Tortured detectives. McDermid's prose, however, is indistinguishable from that of Random Mystery Novelist X: lots of simple sentences, little in the way of inventive dialogue or turns of phrase. And--pet peeve alert!--McDermid loves to over-explicate:
Her wide eyes stared at him, her fingers digging into her cheek as if physically holding her mouth closed could somehow contain her response. He didn't know what to do, what to say. He had so little experience of people's responses to tragedy and crisis. He'd always had senior officers or colleagues with more experience to blunt the acuteness of other people's pain. Now he was on his own, and he knew he would measure himself for ever according to how he dealt with this stricken woman. (72)
Up to that point, Alison Carter had been an important case to Detective Inspector George Bennett. Now it had symbolic importance. Now it was a crusade. (91)
She poured out coffee and tea and sat down at the opposite end of the table from Catherine and Tommy and the Pandora's box she'd gifted them. "You wanted the truth," she said. "Now it's going to be your burden too. See how you like living with it." Catherine stared dumbly at her, only barely beginning to realize the weight of the curse she had brought on her own head. Images engraved on her mind's eye, she already knew she had condemned herself to nightmares. (453)
The other day, I stumbled across a review that described Elmore Leonard as a "cinematic" novelist, and this quirk in McDermid's style could also be classed as cinematic: it flattens out the textual landscape, as it were, making sure that every twist and turn in a character's psyche can be translated into "dramatic" or "objective" terms. Every emotion, every thought, has to be externalized and described as if it were an event. If a character isn't preternaturally self-aware, capable of identifying the narrative significance of his or her feelings, the narrator will step in to provide the necessary sign-posting. Despite the trick that lies at this mystery's heart, Bennett's POV remains as neutral as the narrator's: how he sees reveals nothing about him. Indeed, the style consistently deflects us from "how" to "what." This isn't a recipe for passive reading, whatever that might be--it's a mystery novel, after all, and the reader supposedly is trying to solve the crime along with the detective--but it does eliminate language and any sort of stylistic play as a source of pleasure.**
*--British Glum features gothic rural settings or urban slums, squicky crimes, and unhappy detectives; when filmed, British Glum mysteries usually prove surprisingly economical when it comes to lighting design. British Twee, by contrast, features lots of quirky characters, slightly silly crimes and criminals (even when the crime in question is murder), and more wry humor than the reader quite knows how to handle.
**--By contrast, my favorite British mystery novelist, Reginald Hill, takes exactly the opposite tack: his novels luxuriate in experimental narrative structures, dense thickets of literary allusion, language games, and so forth.