New crime fiction books, including Jasper Fforde’s funny triumph of human creativity
Every reader understands there is an “entirely separate reality that exists within books”, but few writers have leaned into that idea as strongly as Jasper Fforde with his series of Thursday Next novels. Thursday, a literary detective who debuted in The Eyre Affair (2001) and is currently head of the Swindon Library Service, has the capacity to move between the real and literary worlds, defending literature against bad actors who try to manipulate fiction. The eighth novel in the series, Dark Reading Matter (Hodder & Stoughton, £25), delivers Thursday’s toughest case yet. Plagued by villainous literary characters trying to assassinate her (a not uncommon occurrence), Thursday discovers that the Martians from HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds are wreaking havoc in rare editions of Hamlet. But who is behind this latest invasion of Martians? And what is this mysterious Word Engine that seeks to absorb every literary text ever written, including the chaos of dark reading matter – ie the impossibly vast amount of the world’s unpublished fiction? With its “interfictional travel”, “reality field distortions” and “unintentional self-fictionalisation”, Dark Reading Matter is a deliciously mischievous blend of crime, sci-fi and literary fiction, with Fforde’s deadpan style perfectly pitched to undercut the increasingly bizarre events (“You’ve been playing fast and loose with almost every literary convention there is,” the Muse Calliope sternly informs Thursday). But as charming, funny and whimsical as it appears on the surface, Dark Reading Matter is fundamentally a serious novel: not only does Thursday’s adventure allow us to reimagine the way we read fiction, Fforde also raises the spectre of the Word Engine – the existential threat, to literature, of AI -generated fiction – in a story so surreal, so brilliantly imaginative and superbly cohesive, that it makes a mockery of the possibility that a non-human intelligence might duplicate it. The final instalment in the Thursday Next series, Dark Reading Matter is an absolute triumph. Set in the Devil’s Den State Park in the Ozarks, Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait (Little, Brown, £16.99) centres on Audrey Figg, a park ranger and trail guide. When a young girl, Ivy Summers, goes missing during a hike, Audrey is unusually invested in finding her: the reason Audrey became a park ranger is because her younger brother Benny disappeared in the Devil’s Den 15 years previously - while in Audrey’s care: “Some part of her felt that if she could find some evidence of Benny’s final whereabouts, if she could prove something, she could rewind the spool of years and start over from the point that she’d ruined everything.” Moving back and forth between 2004 – the year Benny vanished – and the present day, the novel initially derives its tension from the ticking clock: when a young child goes missing in the 1.2 million acres of the Ozark National Forest, every minute counts. Gradually, however, South introduces a strange and sinister element, one that – without giving away any spoilers – means that In the Woods They Wait unexpectedly mutates into a cross-genre thriller. The storytelling is lean and driven, but where South really scores is in her lyrical but unsentimental descriptions of the Ozark wilderness. The late, great Ken Bruen ’s private eye Jack Taylor first made his way down Galway’s mean streets in The Guards (2001). Galway’s Edge (Head of Zeus, £25) is the 19th novel in the series, and Jack is still taking on all comers, and particularly those who abuse their power (he’ll use a gun if he has to, will Jack, although his preferred weapon is his trusty hurl). Galway is in thrall to a vigilante group calling itself The Edge as the novel opens, a group with a renegade priest pulling its strings; even so, no one is more surprised than the resolutely anticlerical Jack when he is commissioned by the Vatican to put a stop to The Edge and its violence. Nineteen books in, though, the plot is almost superfluous to a Jack Taylor novel. All the interesting stuff happens on the fringes of the story as Jack wanders from pub to pub on his quixotic adventures, encountering the colourful characters who live on the fringes of society and keeping us updated on his latest reading while decrying the state of the world, all the while putting away heroic quantities of Jameson. One of the true (and few) mavericks of Irish crime fiction, Bruen’s loss is keenly felt. Mick Herron ’s series of Slough House novels, featuring the spectacularly slovenly Jackson Lamb, has reinvigorated the modern spy novel since he published Slow Horses in 2010. There have been nine novels in the series to date, most recently last year’s Clown Town, but Herron has also published an intermittent series of novellas featuring some of the minor characters from Lamb’s world. Watch the Quiet Snow (Baskerville, £22) brings together those novellas in a single book, opening with The List (2015) and John Bachelor, a former spook now grinding out a living as a “milkman” checking in on former spies and defectors. Glamour is at a premium, as we might expect, and especially when John has the misfortune to make a mistake that causes First Desk, aka Diana Taverner, to turn her icy glare upon him: “It’s hardly Tinker, Tailor, John. You wipe their noses, feed their cats, make sure they’re not blowing their pensions on internet poker.” With Lamb absent for the most part, the writing is a little more restrained, the mood more elegiac, than in the Slough House novels, and especially in the pick of the bunch, The Last Dead Letter, which is a bona fide spy love story set in cold war Berlin. The smallest of minor characters in the first of Jonathan Ames’s series of private eye novels, A Man Named Doll (2021), LAPD detective Maria Cole takes centre-stage in A Past Without Pictures (Pushkin Vertigo, £9.99). Suspended from duty after killing a Mexican teenage boy on her first night working as a detective, Maria travels to Fair Port on Alabama’s Gulf Coast to bury her estranged father Billy, an ex-convict she hadn’t seen since she was a child and who was murdered during a robbery at his home. Expecting to observe the formalities and depart again, Maria quickly discovers that the murder suspect is a young black man who knew her father through their AA meetings, and that Fair Port’s chief of police, Rawlins, is an old-fashioned bigot: “Hard thing to get over,” Rawlins tells Maria. “Killing somebody. But I guess you know that now. Even if it was a Mex.” Crime fiction: Hitchcockian flair in modern Ireland, and a note-perfect Mexican noir Ames has published eight novels, including the stand-alone You Were Never Really Here (2013). There are echoes of that novel in Maria’s past traumas and her unusual coping mechanisms, and fans of Daniel Woodrell’s country noir will find parallels in this elegantly crafted southern noir of corruption, racism, violence and redemption. The true-crime dilemma: ‘Family of people who have been harmed could hear these stories’ Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).