February 4, 2013
A Question of Identity by Susan Hill
I can’t believe that A Question of Identity is only my third Simon Serrailler mystery. It feels like my connection to these books goes deeper, like these are characters I’ve known for a long long time. Which is a testament to the depth of the books in this series, though I wonder if Susan Hill has finally crossed a line, if the Simon Serrailler novels are now incapable of standing alone. I can imagine that a reader who picks up this one looking for a good whodunnit might be confused by all the attention on Simon Serrailler’s sister, Dr. Cat Deerbon, her work in a hospice, trouble amongst her adolescent children. Would they know what to make of Simon’s stepmother who is hiding some kind of terrible secret about her marriage? And what of Simon’s relationship with Rachel, whose husband is in the final stages of Parkinson’s Disease? Who dun what anyway, that isn’t contained in some rich and wonderful back-story?
For those of us well-versed in the back-story, A Question of Identity is a kind of homecoming. Susan Hill is a wonderful writer whose crime novels are as rich as any literary novel in terms of character, writing, and depth. And what I most appreciate about them are how much they are of this world. In A Question of Identity, a group of readers get together to form a book club to support their local independent bookshop, which is struggling in these tough economic times…
And yes, I admire Hill’s novels’ unabashed bookishness too. Right before a character is killed off, Hill has her compiling a list of books for a lending library she’s thinking of starting at the seniors’ complex she’s just moved to. “She was well into her stride, remembering books she’d loved, wondering if this or that novel was out of print, adding ‘Miss Read’ hastiliy, then ‘Nancy Mitford’ and “Denis Lehane’–one of her own favourites, but possibly a bit too raw for some…. She was enjoying herself, and had just jotted down Daphne du Maurier when she heard a sound…”
So yes, onto the murders. At a (poorly constructed–typical) newly-built seniors’ housing complex in Lafferton, two women have been killed in the dead of night in a bizarre ritual, with no signs of forced entry. Simon Serrailler and his team find a break when they link the crimes to a few committed in Yorkshire years before, except the accused in those cases was shockingly acquitted and fixed with a new identity for his own protection afterwards. Which means that he is now untraceable, and authorities are refusing to disclose any information to police in Lafferton. Simon is faced with having to track down a suspect whose existence has been wiped off the face of the earth.
Somewhat disappointingly, I guessed the murderer quite early on in the book, which says something because I’m normally quite a rubbish sleuth. There just weren’t enough other suspects, and Hill has the suspect finally caught in a sting that felt somewhat artificial. So perhaps as a crime novel this one comes up short, but then I still read it with utter pleasure, and I’m not sure that a good crime plot was ever what I came to these novels looking for anyway.
February 7, 2012
The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill
While the business of writing, publishing and book selling in Canada has certainly been adversely affected by the economic chaos of the past four years, our stories themselves have largely remained untouched by such things. (Possible exceptions are a few writers working with post-apocalyptic visions, but I would bet their work is more prescient than written in response to current events.) Elsewhere, however, in countries where effects of crises have been more overt, the literature is already reflecting economic troubles and their impacts– the Irish real-estate boom was an overarching theme of Anne Enright’s brilliant The Forgotten Waltz, and Penelope Lively’s How It All Began has banks going bust and bottoms falling out of businesses built on too much credit.
And even detective fiction isn’t safe. Susan Hill’s latest Simon Serrailler novel The Betrayal of Trust is operating in a very current environment of austerity and cuts. When flash floods unearth the bodies of two dead women in Lafferton, Simon is without the resources necessary to assemble a team to investigate their murders thoroughly. One of the bodies is that of a local teenage girl who’d gone missing fifteen years ago, but the identity of the other remains unknown, and it’s a mystery what happened to either of them. Simon must find a way to crack these cold cases, even venturing to try a crime show re-enactment on television to do the job the police themselves would have done not so long ago. Even after all these years, he knows that someone out there must know something.
Susan Hill is one of those writers I mentioned when I read Louise Penny in December, part of a British tradition of mystery writers who can really write. She’s written five other books in the Simon Serrailler series (I read The Vows of Silence in 2008), numerous works of literary fiction, she’s the author of The Woman in Black (which has just been made into a film starring Harry Potter, no less!), and I adored her Howards End is On the Landing. She’s got cred, and it shows through in The Betrayal of Trust, whose characters are rich and whole and woven into several plots that offer the novel its depth– Simon is lovelorn, we meet his recently widowed sister Cat who is a doctor working with hospice patients (and yes, the hospice too is struggling to find funding). One of her patients has just received a terminal diagnosis, and is considering the decision to end her own life. Another character, whose connection to the plot we’re not quite sure of until the end, is struggling to care for a partner whose dementia has rendered her a violent stranger. Hill herself has never been shy with her politics, which means that euthanasia here is treated for the most part without nuance and as a sinister business undermining the sanctity of life from all angles, and also that Serrailler and his murder investigation is not this novel’s chief focus. The second point, however, I don’t intend as a criticism; the crime novels that are most rich have as much life as they have murder (even if here, the life is mostly concerned with its end).
The two Simon Serrailler novels I’ve read have featured meta glimpses of the real world within its page, The Vows of Silence with its dedications to “The Wedding Guests” (!). In The Betrayal of Trust, Hill acknowledges a debt to Antonia Fraser, which became apparent to me on page 117 when Simon at the end of a party faces the (married) woman he’s met that night and asks her, “Must you go?” I cheered in recognition, and so began another narrative strand of the novel, Simon in love. And while this strand, with others, is not so neatly tied up by the book’s end, the open-endedness of Hill’s conclusion makes particularly clear that we’ll have another Simon Serrailler novel to look forward to before long.
June 30, 2008
The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill
There is a precedent for me appreciating crime fiction turns by literary writers, and her name is Kate Atkinson and so I was intrigued to read The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill. I’d read Hill’s 1973 novel In the Springtime of the Year quite recently, she has run her own press Long Barn Books since 1997, and is a very prolific blogger.
I also suspect that it’s true that I’d like crime fiction full stop, but I’ve not read enough of it to be sure of this. The rush to the end though, pieces fall together– it’s my favourite part of reading anything.
The Vows of Silence is fourth in a series of Simon Serrailler novels (and a fifth is in the works). Though the book stood alone just fine, back story illuminated whenever necessary, but not so that detail was superfluous. I had all the tools I required to follow the story of Detective Simon Serrailler, on the case when random sniper starts shooting young women in the Cathedral town of Lafferton. The first victim a new bride shot dead just inside her apartment, then a group of girls out at a club for a hen night, and a wedding dress designer who’s been advertising in town– and all this with an upcoming wedding at the cathedral, with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall scheduled to be in attendance.
I’m not sure this is the case with most crime novels, but it is in my limited experience that neither the crimes themselves, nor their solving are what first and foremost propels the narrative. Perhaps in the last fifty pages, yes, who done it will keep you reading late into the night, but there has to be more to drive a whole book. Here it was the characters, the lives of the people of Lafferton, and their interconnectedness, their various connections to the crimes. Hill’s background as a literary writer evident as she populates this community with such vivid characters– people– and the different ways these peoples’ lives are cast in the shadow of the crimes taking place around them.
Hill has stated writing crime fiction appeals to her as an opportunity to address contemporary life and its issues, and this engagement is well reflected here. Also themes relating to love, marriage and togetherness continue– Simon’s sister husband’s diagnosis of a brain tumour, a widow falling in love again, Simon’s father’s new partner becoming part of their family. Simon juxtaposed with all of this, a loner, whose own story is hard to decipher from just this one book out of a series, and what would probably send a curious reader back to the previous three. Who also hasn’t the time much to analyze his personal life, what with just days until the cathedral wedding and the gunman still out on the loose…
I do wonder, what in a literary writer’s background makes the foundation of a good crime writer? Strength in plot-building, definitely, and I could see how short story experience would be beneficial to compressing much into little, and it would take a novelist’s deft hand to bind all these pieces together. Certainly Susan Hill’s apprenticeship must have served her well, for The Vows of Silence is a pleasure.
(By the way, in terms of genre-crossing, an interesting post on Hill being welcome or otherwise in the exclusive world of crime fiction.)
