To The Last Page

But for a few references to Playstations, Transformers and Spiderman, Pierre Lemaitre’s Three Days and a Life could easily pass for one of George Simenon’s timeless small-town murder thrillers. There’s the same observations made about the nature of provincial communities in Lemaitre’s novel, where simmering tensions and suspicions are stoked up in the small town of Beauval in 1999 when a 6 year old boy called Rémi Desmedt goes missing. As is often the case with such situations in Simenon’s small town crimes, the killer is already known and rather than the police investigation being the focus of the story, it becomes more about how the killer and the community respond to the events. On the one hand it brings out the underlying prejudices and suspicions that thrive in such places. Fingers of suspicion are pointed at ‘outsiders’ like shop owner Monsieur Kowalski, commonly known as Frankenstein, (“You only have to look at him”) and at one of the local school teachers M. Guénot suspected o...

You tend to take memory for granted and trust it implicitly. How would it be however if you could only remember yesterday, or at most yesterday and the day before? Come to that, how much do you take for granted the importance of memory when it comes to solving crime? How effective could you be as a police detective if you could only remember the previous two days, or even only the previous day? This is the world of Felicia Yap’s Yesterday , a world of Monos and Duos, where people are able to retain full memory up to the age of 23, but after that, they need to rely on written diaries and special iDiaries developed by Apple (who else?) to recall anything important that has happened in their lives. Like a murder? That’s going to make life difficult. And yet, people seem to manage, even though the difference in ability has created certain prejudices and inequality between Monos who can only remember the last day before it is erased from their memory, and Duos, who can remember twice as muc...

Although ‘he’ is never actually named, there’s no question that the third-person pronoun that is the subject of John Connolly’s surprising new novel is based on the life of the partner of one Oliver Norvell ‘Babe’ Hardy, the two of them forming the greatest comedy partnership in movie history. Over the course of the book ‘he’s’ reminiscences reflect on the likes of Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Leo McCarey, Hal Roach, Mack Sennet and other names now mostly forgotten from this period like Larry Semon and Broncho Billy Anderson, who were nonetheless influential names in the Golden Age of Hollywood Comedy. It was also the Golden Age of Hollywood vice and scandal, and Connolly’s novel quickly demolishes any remaining romanticised view you might have had of the movie stars of the silent era, the comedy short and the expansion of the industry into feature films. It might also cause you to view the beloved and untouchable duo of Laurel and Hardy in a new light, but while Conno...

I have to admit to a certain sense of excited anticipation at the prospect of reading a new book that proposes a solution to the unsolved notorious Black Dahlia murder. It’s not that I was all that familiar with the details of the Black Dahlia case - although it’s hard to not be aware of such a famous murder mystery - but I had read Piu Eatwell’s investigation into another historical true life case ( The Dead Duke ), and I was sure that her methods of exploring archive records, accounts and interviews would be no less rigorous, the inferences weighed and balanced and the revelations no less fascinating. The case of the Black Dahlia might be more recent and more well-known than the Edwardian Druce-Portland case in The Dead Duke , but the challenges of getting to the truth of this notoriously unsolved case are just as difficult. The brutally mutilated and bisected naked body of 22 year old Elizabeth Short was discovered on a vacant lot of an LA suburb in January 1947. Although the police...

The existence of spies and espionage goes back far beyond the twentieth century, but it’s only in 1909, with turbulent events taking place in Germany and Russia and trouble from Europe spilling over into England that counter-espionage is being taken seriously for the very first time. The Edwardian era is also significant for deeper changes in English society, and although the relevance of it being a post-Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes era might appear to be the least important of matters, it does nonetheless highlight changes in certain attitudes that H B Lyle brings out well in The Irregular . I said that counter-espionage was being taken seriously for the first time, but that is rather getting ahead of things. The work of Captain Vernon Kells in the newly formed Secret Intelligence Bureau is initially not being taken very seriously at all. No-one else in the government departments (with the exception of a certain Winston Churchill) really believes that British interests are at all threa...