wot i red on my hols by alan robson (beatus annus novissimus)

Generally speaking Australian detective stories are set either in the densely populated coastal cities or in the very sparsely populated and deadly deserts of the interior. But there’s always an exception to prove the rule and Candice Fox’s Crimson Lake trilogy takes place in the tropical jungles of the top end. Crocodiles, snakes, leeches and mosquitoes are everywhere. One of the crocodiles might even have been used as a murder weapon. Or was it just a convenient garbage disposal unit?

And of course there are the geese. Don’t ever forget the geese.

The novels have rather an odd structure. Probably about half to three-quarters of each book is narrated in the first person by Ted Conkaffey, the major viewpoint character. Other sections are narrated in the third person by several different people which gives a lot of useful information about what they are thinking and doing when Ted is not around, and sometimes even when he is. Strangely this structure works very well, once you’ve got used to it.

Candice Fox has also made an oddly uncomfortable choice about the character of the first person narrator. Ted Conkaffey used to be a policeman in Sydney. But his life fell apart when he was arrested and tried for the abduction, assault and rape of a thirteen year old girl. His trial came to a premature end when the prosecution was deemed not to have enough evidence to proceed. But that does not mean that Ted was found not guilty. He was merely discharged, and the expectation is that if more evidence turns up he will be brought back to trial again.

To begin with at least, the reader absolutely has to assume that Ted is telling the truth when he claims to be innocent of the charges levelled against him – if you don’t make that assumption, you simply can’t identify with (or have any sympathy for) the man himself. If you believe that he really did commit the crime he has been accused of it would make the novels almost impossible to read without squirming. Fortunately Candice Fox is far too skilful a writer to let that happen. And so you can rest assured that we do eventually learn the full circumstances surrounding the case against Ted. But it’s a long time coming and meanwhile there’s always that nagging suspicion.

But, of course,  innocent or guilty, the public always assumes that there is no smoke without fire and despite Ted’s protestations of innocence, he is condemned in the court of public opinion. He is branded a paedophile on the front page of every newspaper, TV news broadcast and social media page in the country. He loses his job, his wife and access to his child. His life is threatened by vigilantes who view Conkaffey as detestable scum. Running from his accusers, Ted takes refuge in Crimson Lake, a small township just outside Cairns. But even in the back of beyond he cannot keep his circumstances secret and it isn’t long before Ted is again ostracised, victimised and, of course, threatened with violence.

Lost In his loneliness and looking for distractions, Ted rescues a wounded goose who has six gosling children. He nurses her back to health and helps her to raise the goslings. They don’t judge him for the crimes he insists he didn’t commit. Amusingly, in an afterword to the first novel, Candice Fox reveals that fans have threatened her with violence if anything untoward should ever happen to the geese. So rest assured, all the geese live long and happy lives…

But that’s more than can be said for Ted Conkaffey.

There are one or two people in his life who do actually believe that Ted is innocent of the charges brought against him. One of these is his defence lawyer. When Ted moves to Crimson Lake, his lawyer puts Ted in touch with Amanda Pharrell, a private investigator, and suggests that he should apply for a job with her. Soon Ted is working closely with Amanda, helping her with her investigations. This is something of a two edged sword. Like Ted, Amanda is also a social pariah. She is a convicted murderer who stabbed her closest friend to death when they were both teenagers. She has served a long prison sentence for that crime.

As it happens, Amanda rather enjoyed her years in prison. It was the making of her in many rather peculiar ways and as a direct result she has become very self-sufficient. Therefore she really doesn't care one way or another what anybody thinks about her. She is also more than a little eccentric (some might even call her weird) and she always feels quite free to indulge her eccentricities, no matter how inappropriate they may be in any given circumstance. Every so often she speaks in rhyming couplets. She won’t allow anyone to touch her (this rule is sometimes slightly relaxed in emergencies, though only for very special people) and she point blank refuses to ride in any motorised vehicles. She travels everywhere on her bicycle and is always struggling to keep up with Ted as he drives pell-mell to a crime scene. But somehow they manage, even though Ted finds her quite embarrassing on occasion. Amanda, of course, enjoys his embarrassment.

Just as Ted has his geese so does Amanda have her cats. She once rescued a sick cat who rewarded her by giving birth to ten kittens so now Amanda has become an inadvertent mad cat lady. She professes not to like the cats, but everybody knows the real truth, of course...

Amanda’s eccentricities are not restricted to her domestic life – in her professional capacity as a private investigator she is equally as bizarre and unpredictable. Nevertheless, odd though they may be, her methods do produce results – playing with a victim’s golf clubs on his own front lawn and smashing a suspect’s television set to smithereens with an axe both provide her with vital clues that everyone else has overlooked. Amanda’s scenes swing wildly between the highly comic and the highly tragic. It’s hard to make that work effectively, but Candice Fox succeeds brilliantly. These novels will make you both laugh and cry, sometimes within the course of a single sentence.

The three novels each centre around a fairly standard detective story mystery which Ted and Amanda solve exactly as you would expect them to. But the overall story arc of Ted’s supposed paedophilia and the murder that has dominated Amanda’s life are what really carry the story forwards. Both Amanda and Ted have to learn to live with public condemnation. Candice Fox’s examination of how each of them struggles to cope with an almost universal enmity is what makes these novels stand head and shoulders above the competition. She gets inside Ted and Amanda’s minds, turns them inside out and examines the bits under a microscope. It’s an extraordinarily impressive performance. The Crimson Lake trilogy is utterly brilliant.

* * * *

So far there are only two books in J. L. Blackhurst’s Impossible Crimes series. I am eagerly anticipating the third because the second book ends with such a breathtaking revelation that I simply can’t wait to find out what happens next.

And when you think about it, successfully pulling off a trick like that is pretty much the whole point of being a novelist.

The premise of the books is very simple – several completely impossible crimes have taken place and the protagonists not only have to find out who committed the crimes, they also have to work out how the crimes were actually done!

In the first novel there are three traditional locked room mystery murders to solve (because one is never enough). In the second novel the murderee (as it were) is discovered only after the effigy in which he has been concealed has been burned to ashes on a bonfire. And then, for good measure, this gruesome killing is quickly followed by yet another locked room murder. The game’s afoot!!

A word of advice – you really must read these novels in order. The second novel contains massive spoilers for the first and I presume that the third will do the same for the second. And so ad infinitum...

As Three Card Murder, the first novel, opens we meet Detective Inspector Tess Fox. We soon learn that Tess joined the police force because of an incident that happened fifteen years previously when Tess had come to the rescue her half-sister Sarah who had been caught in the menacing clutches of some very nasty men. In order to effect the rescue, Tess had been forced to kill one of the men. Ever since then both she and Sarah have kept that murder a secret from their friends, family and colleagues. Not surprisingly the killing has had a profound effect upon Tess’s life. It directly motivated her to join the police in an attempt to atone, in some small way, for her transgression. It was also the direct cause of Tess’s fifteen year estrangement from her family because she didn’t want to take the risk that they might find out what she had done and condemn her for it.

But now Tess has been called upon to investigate a new murder, her first as a Detective Inspector. To her horror she discovers that the victim is one of the other men who had been menacing Sarah all those years before. Surely that can’t be a coincidence? As an added complication, the murder victim had been thrown from the balcony of a room that was locked and boarded up on the inside. And, of course, CCTV footage shows quite conclusively that nobody entered or left the room in the hours before and just after the murder. What a conundrum!

Whether she likes it or not, Tess is going to have to re-establish contact with her family, particularly with Sarah, not only because Sarah has a direct connection to the murdered man but also because Sarah’s own peculiar skills might give Tess some insight into just how the impossible murder could have been committed in the first place. You see, Sarah’s family are grifters, con-artists who make their living separating greedy fools from their money. Sarah herself is a world-class expert in the short con, the simple deceptions that can be used to hoodwink the mark into giving up a few dollars here and a few pounds there as the wool is pulled over his eyes by some conjuring trick and/or some logical fallacy on which the mark can make a (losing) bet. Read the book if you want more details about how the three card monte scam works or how it is possible to drink three huge pints of beer before the mark can finish drinking three very small glasses of whisky.

You can’t really make a living from short cons. The family actually makes most of their money from long cons – tricks that build up over time and which generally involve umpteen thousands of marks (sic), yen, bucks or pounds, so to sing. Sarah’s short cons are run mainly for her own amusement but her skills at making the mark believe in the impossible are the same kind of skills that can provide solutions to a locked room murder mystery. At least, Tess hopes they are…

It’s all too easy for novels of this kind to turn into little more than a breathless and formulaic race to figure out the intricate ingenuity of the mechanisms that lie behind the impossible crimes. That’s why I don’t much like the novels of John Dickson Carr. He is, quite rightly, regarded as the master of the locked room mystery. He wrote more than 60 locked room stories, each more ingenious than the last. But once you know just how the crime was committed and exactly what the gimmick was this time, there really isn’t very much left to play with. The characterisation is paper thin and the plots lack depth. The "people" in the stories are just ciphers, puppets going through the motions, their strings being pulled by the necessity to find out just how the trick works. Once everyone finds that out, there’s really nothing left to play with. That makes for a very unsatisfying read.  Sometimes ingenuity is not nearly enough.

The same is most definitely not true of J. L. Blackhurst’s novels. The relationships between Tess and Sarah and between Tess and her work colleagues are complex and fascinating and while you have to gasp in admiration at the cleverness of the locked room solutions (J. L. Blackhurst is certainly mounting a very real challenge to John Dickson Carr) you can definitely read and re-read these books several times solely on the strength of the bits of business going on between the characters together with the entertaining way that they live their lives. The mysteries of the MacGuffin(s) are not the be-all and the end-all of these books. The be-all and the end-all are the people themselves, good, bad, indifferent, eccentric and dull. Just like real life with added humour.

By the end of the story we know who did the murders, why they did them and how they did them. But we are still left with questions about Tess and her family, questions which make us turn immediately to the second novel in the series, looking for answers…

Smoke and Murders introduces us to the Lewes Bonfire Society. Every year on the fifth of November they hold a huge parade which ends with fireworks and a bonfire on which an effigy is burned. Originally the effigy was that of Guy Fawkes of course (gunpowder, treason and plot, don’t you know), but over the years various other rogues and villains have been substituted for the original Guy. This year they plan on burning a huge orange effigy of Donald Trump which they have been building for several weeks. Everyone is greatly looking forward to seeing Trump get incinerated. But as the flames consume him, his huge head falls off. Everybody cheers and applauds at the sight of it. Then a shocked silence falls as a charred human skull rolls out from the remains of Donald’s head. Donald, it seems, was carrying a passenger.

The incinerated corpse is soon identified as being that of Rupert Millington, the local MP and general pain in the arse. Ironically he had recently been campaigning to have the Lewes Bonfire Society parade banned on the grounds that it is a bloody annoying nuisance. Could that be the motive for killing and burning him? Surely not…

Tess Fox is soon called in to work on the case. Sarah tags along with her because members of her family actually have a very close involvement with the Lewes Bonfire Society for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling the first book. But take it from me, the reasons are good ones. Unfortunately one of those reasons soon finds herself under arrest on suspicion of murdering another member of the Lewes Bonfire Society. As it happens, both Tess and Sarah actually witnessed that second murder taking place but of course they saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary while it was going on. The room in which the killing occurred was locked from the inside and there was nobody standing over the body when they finally forced the door open. And, as you might expect, neither Tess nor Sarah saw anybody at all coming or going from the vicinity. Nevertheless the murder happened. Inexplicably, the dirty deed was done.

That is really about all I can say without serious spoilers. But take it from me, the book is just as much of a delight as the first one was, for exactly the same reasons. And the ending will literally make your brain explode* and leave you gasping with enormous delight and huge frustration.

Roll on book number three.

(*) Pedantic footnote.

I am well aware that I have used the word literally in a figurative sense. I’ve done it quite deliberately because:

1. It’s fun
2. Used sparingly, it’s a surprisingly effective literary device.
3. It never fails to annoy the snot out of literally minded pedants who have no poetry in their souls. And that’s fun as well.