Something old, something new …

A couple of weeks ago I was thrilled to receive a review copy of Clifford Witting’s, Silence After Dinner, the latest of his crime novels to be published by the splendid Galileo Publishers. It isn’t strictly speaking Golden Age, as it was published in 1953, but it’s very much in the GA spirit. It opens with an anonymous diary entry in which the writer confesses to having murdered a soldier and, worse, his faithful servant, while escaping from communist China. The focus then shifts to a vicarage in Witting’s fictional South Downs county. One of the pleasures of the book is the evocation of village life, particularly the rivalry and bad feeling when the Reverend Micheldever retires and is far from happy with the preaching of his successor. And then the vicar’s feckless defrocked son returns from China – is he the diarist , whose confessions contine to appear from time to time? – or maybe it’s the new vicar or even a local aristocratic farmer? Another murder occurs; the novel is a genuine whodunnit and though I did guess who the villain was, I very much enjoyed it  – with a couple of reservations. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the murderer’s confession and there was a considerable amount of racial stereotyping in the depiction of the new vicar’s Chinese servants. Of its time, I suppose, and as Inspector Bradfield leaves the headquarter of the Downshire Missions in Asia, he does at least reflect that ‘even today there were white men no less barbarous’ than missionary-eating cannibals.

I don’t read a lot of contemporary crime fiction, but recently I did enjoy Jo Callaghan’s In the Blink of an Eye. It is an odd couple story, a very odd couple: one of the detectives isn’t even human. It (rather than he) is an AI generated hologram. DCS Kat Frank on the other hand is all too human. She is a bit of maverick, but not excessively so. She has just returned to work after the death of her husband and has a troubled teenage son. When she is picked to lead a pilot programme and paired with AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) Lock, she is not happy. Lock is a Spock-like entity, entirely rational, whereas Kat relies as much on instinct as logic. When two of the missing person cold cases that they are reviewing become active, it turns out that more than one life is at stake and they have to find a way of working together. This is a well paced story, funny as well as gripping. I raced through it: a great holiday read.