the times | Saturday January 1 2022 saturday review 17Outback intrigue
and a new Morse
Mark Sanderson’s crime choices also include a
case of fiendish wordplay and a ‘death cleaner’
Opal Country by Chris Hammer
Wildfire, 512pp; £16.99
Welcome to Finnigans Gap, New South
Wales, where folk live in “everything
from neat kit homes through converted
shipping containers to shanties patched
together from corrugated iron, plastic
sheeting and second-hand scaffolding”.
Sydneysider Ivan Lucic and two col-
leagues are sent to this boiling hellhole
when opal thieves discover a prospector
who has been crucified underground.
Detective Constable Narelle Buchanan,
who meets them off the plane, comes to
think of Detective Sergeant Lucic as “a
lone wolf forced to tend a flock; consider-
ate one moment, distant the next”. She is
unaware of his addiction to gambling.
Like Chris Hammer’s three previous
novels — Scrublands (2018), Silver (2019)
and Trust (2020) — this is a big, fat mystery
in which the vividly described landscape is
as much a character as the cast.
Lucic and Buchanan discover a link to an
earlier death. Zeke Jakowitz, a young man
from the Rapture, a cult led by a charlatan
called the Seer, was found fried to death in
the middle of a salt lake with marks that
suggested he had been wearing a crown
of thorns. This novel — tighter, tougher,
tenser — is Hammer’s best work yet.The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett
Viper, 384pp; £14.99
Steven Smith, an ex-con, has left the story
of his life on 200 audio files retrieved from
an iPhone. They have been transcribed by
DecipherIt™, a less-than-reliable app that
renders “must have” as “mustard” and
“swastika” as “swash ticker”.
And what a story he has to tell. Once
upon a time he found a children’s book by
Edith Twyford, Six on Goldtop Hill, on aLondon bus. When he showed it to his
remedial English teacher Miss Iles (“mis-
siles”) she told him it had been banned for
political incorrectness. However, he and
his classmates loved the story of posh kids
beating baddies so much that Miss Iles
took them to the house where Twyford
lived in the countryside near Bourne-
mouth. Yet something happened on the
trip that was so bad Little Steve — now a
security guard known as Slop Out Steve —
never saw Miss Iles again.
Could her disappearance be connected
with the persistent rumour that Twyford’s
tales contained coded information for
secret agents in the field? Why was Steve
in prison for such a long time? You’ll just
have to read this wonderful novel, which
may start like James Joyce rewriting Agat-
ha Christie with anagrams and acrostics.,
but ends up being a moving, multistory
mystery about the power of books.The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace
McGill by CS Robertson
Hodder & Stoughton, 368pp; £14.99
Amazing Grace McGill does a job few
could hold down (or even hold down their
breakfast while doing). She is “a lonely
death cleaner”, disinfecting the homes of
people who have died. Some might say
she takes an unhealthy interest in the lives
of the deceased. She even makes miniature
dioramas of the rooms she cleans.
When she finds a dried daisy in the
homes of two of the dead she goes to the
police, who pooh-pooh her suggestion that
there may be a serial killer at work in Glas-
gow. There are jaw-dropping revelations
and startling assertions in Craig Robert-
son’s gruesome tale: “Nature makes sure
men are likely to die before their wives
because they’re useless at living withoutwoop woop Chris
Hammer’s Opal Country
deals with murder in the
Australian outbackthem”; “death smells different when you
know the person who’s died.” It is a story of
corpse dust, singing poppet Lena Zavaroni
and a black-and-white photo of five pals:
“Quiet boy; freckles boy; Tommy boy; grin-
ning boy; fat boy.” Tommy Agnew is the
first liquefied corpse we encounter. His
fate, like many in this gut-wrenching thrill-
er, is described with a bruised compassion.The Couple at the Table by Sophie
Hannah Hodder & Stoughton, 368pp;
£16.99
Detective Simon Waterhouse and Charlie
Zailer, his partner at work and home, can’t
even enjoy a weekend at a couples-only
resort without one of their fellow guests
being fatally stabbed. Six months on, even
though the killer must be one of the other
nine people dining at Tevedon on the
night, he or she has not been identified.
Sophie Hannah’s amusing take on the
“dream break becomes living nightmare”
format presents that weekend’s events
from the viewpoint of each guest in the
past and present. She bamboozles the
reader by revealing secrets, lies, clues and
red herrings galore.
Waterhouse and Zailer, who made their
debuts in Little Face (2006), remain the
main attraction. “In certain moods, Char-
lie could make herself cry thinking about
all the women married to men who weren’t
Simon, and the blissfully easy lives they
must be having.” The Couple at the Table
is a wise and witty portrait of modern
marriage — and murder.A Killing in November by Simon
Mason riverrun, 352pp; £14.99
Detective Inspector Ryan Wilkins (white,
dragged up in an Oxford trailer park,
wears trackie bottoms and a baseball cap,
very gobby) meets Detective Inspector
Ray Wilkins (black, raised in Ealing, edu-
cated at Balliol, natty dresser, polite) when
the former, instead of the latter, is mistak-
enly sent to Barnabas Hall where the body
of a woman has been found in the provost’s
study. Ryan has a problem with “privileged
elites” — he’s just been transferred from
Wiltshire after “nutting” the Bishop of
Salisbury — but he’s a brilliant detective
and his less-than-deferential interview
with the hoity-toity Oxford don is the first
of many hilarious and revealing confron-
tations with his supposed betters.
Simon Mason has reformulated Inspec-
tor Morse for the 2020s. The picturesque
colleges are as beautiful as ever; what tran-
spires inside them is as ugly as ever. There
is still trouble on the Blackbird Leys estate.
The murder mystery, which involves a
scaredy-cat sheikh and a Syrian refugee, is
worthy of Colin Dexter, but the result is
less bookish and more bolshie.
Ryan is a marvellous creation. No doubt,
in real life he would be a nightmare to deal
with, but on the page it’s always a pleasure
to be in his company. The scenes with his
angelic two-year-old son, Ryan Jr (“Is it
hard being a daddy?”), are superb and his
relationship with Ray, a snob with a heart
of gold beneath the sharp suit, shows huge
potential. The good news is they’ll be back.MIKE BOWERScrime
Book
of the
monthrefresh, through crackpot violence, a plun-
dered earth.” She meets Jeffrey, a preternat-
urally bright ten-year-old, who is studying
law while road tripping with his drunken
mother. Later — how much later isn’t clear;
time is as meaningless in Harrow as
the future — Khristen runs into
Jeffrey again: he is a judge,
still ten, in what appears
to be the underworld.
If the narrative is
fractured, well, so is
our world. And that is
Williams’s point, one
she amplifies with
references to har-
rows — spiky tools
that break up the earth
— which are every-
where in her broken land.
“What good stories deal
with is the horror and incom-
prehensibility of time, the dark en-
croachment of old catastrophes,” Williams
has said; she could have been talking about
Harrow, a book that is as baffling and frus-
trating as it is brilliant and inspiring. Any-
one new to her has a treat in store, provided
they can get hold of her backlist.writer. The plot, such as it is, revolves
around Khristen. Her mother believes she
is destined for something extraordinary
after briefly dying as an infant before com-
ing back to life. Khristen is sent to a bizarre
boarding school in an old sanatorium.
There are no books and no
paper and the students have
no idea what they are
being groomed for.
“Perhaps the ruthless
and painful require-
ments of nothing.” In
any case, school life
is curtailed when the
campus is closed and
the pupils expelled in-
to a land “bright with
raging fires ringed by
sportsmen shooting the
crazed creatures trying to
escape the flames”.
Khristen winds up looking for her
mother at an old motel on the edge of a lake
known as Big Girl. There she finds a crazed
band of geriatric eco-revolutionaries.
“They were a gabby seditious lot, in the
worst of health but with kamikaze hearts,
an army of the aged and ill, determined toT
here is an inverse correlation
between the brilliance of Joy
Williams’s writing and the ease
of getting hold of it in Britain.
Williams, 77, is one of the greats
of American literature, fêted by big names
from Raymond Carver to Don DeLillo.
Her previous novel, The Quick and the
Dead, a Pulitzer finalist, is out of print here.
Her short stories, more than 30 years of
work collected in The Visiting Privilege,
were published in Britain only in 2016.
A fanfare, then, for Harrow, Williams’s
first novel since 2000 and the culmination
of decades of eco-angst kindled in theThe apocalypse (with jokes)
1980s by writing about tourism’s destruc-
tive impact on the Florida Keys, where she
used to live. If Williams’s world was at the
edge of an ecological disaster in The Quick
and the Dead, it plunges off that precipice
in Harrow, a caustic tale about the collapse
of civilisation.
“It’s too late to be afraid,” says Khristen,
a young woman who is ostensibly the main
character. Williams, right, whose father
was a Congregationalist minister, sets the
tone with a prologue set in Purgatory: a
group chat among themselves while
awaiting what comes next in a scene that
conjures the harrowing of Hell, the period
between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrec-
tion. “I think the world is dying because we
were dead to its astonishments pretty
much. It’ll be around but it will become less
and less until it’s finally compatible with
our feelings for it,” a nameless voice says.
The message may be bleak but the tone is
anything but; Williams is a bitingly funnyHarrow
by Joy WilliamsTuskar Rock, 204pp; £14.99This tale of end times
by a great overlooked
writer inspires and
baffles Susie Mesure
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