The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penny

Like most right-thinking people, I have a bit of a fear of prize-winning novels. Despite feeling a weird sort of moral obligation to read them, I frequently find them boring, turgid, overwritten and without a sufficiently strong story to support the weight of all those words. If any of you have been living in fear of “The Tenderness of Wolves”, you can stop now. Despite winning the Costa Book of the Year 2006, it’s a very readable detective story and actually a real page-turner. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I began to wonder why this counts as literary fiction while, say, the Inspector Morse novels don’t. So far, I’ve no answer to that.

At the start of a Canadian winter, a middle aged settler, Mrs Ross gets up one day to find that her neighbour, Laurent Jammet has been murdered and scalped during the night, and her teenage son has also gone missing. Pretty soon the gossips are suggesting that the two events are related. Some officials from The Hudson’s Bay Company (like a sort of Canadian equivalent of the Eat India Company) are sent to investigate and they get to work trampling on the feelings of the locals and busting some heads. As winter approaches, Mrs Ross chooses to set off through the snow in search of her son, in the hope of clearing his name.

I note that the Hudson Bay Trading Company is not only real, but is still trading. A wonder that it hasn’t sued Ms Penny as the story doesn’t show it a particularly good light. Mind you, I doubt that any of the unpleasant things the company and its representatives do aren’t historically accurate.

Anyway, if you’re planning to read this book for yourself, then stop reading this blog because I couldn’t work out how to discuss the book further without giving away some of the ending.

My overall impression is one of bleakness. Firstly we have the beautifully described Canadian winter, complete with frostbite, snow blindness and having to defrost the ink before you can write letters. Bleaker still, though, is that every single character seems to be an outsider. Everyone is isolated and alone in the world:

• Mrs Ross carries the burden of her past as an asylum inmate and laudanum addict. By the time the story takes place her marriage has deteriorated to the point where her husband does not look at her or speak to her. I imagine them both looking as miserable as the couple in this famous picture. Mrs Ross’s son, Francis has also stopped speaking to her for reasons of his own...
• Francis Ross cannot tell anyone about his romantic involvement with the murder victim, because it’s the 1840s and he’d probably be jailed or thrown in the loony bin. Nevertheless, his father guesses and becomes moodier than ever.
• Donald Moody is deeply neurotic and convinced of his own inferiority. He has come from Scotland to work for the Company but hates the cold, the hardship, and the rough men who spend all winter drunk because there is nothing else to do. His motivation in aiding Mrs Ross is not so much a desire for justice, but to cover his arse out of fear that he will be deemed to have screwed up and his career will be over. He wastes a good deal of time mooning over the beautiful Susannah Knox before realising that it her clever, challenging sister, Maria he wants. Unfortunately, this realisation comes a bit late in the day, and Donald is shot by the villain before he can tell Maria about it.
• Maria Knox is now doomed to die alone and be eaten by her cats, thanks to Donald’s death. Eclipsed by her prettier younger sister she has become a forbidding intellectual type and up to now, men have bolted at the sight of her.
• Mr Knox has thrown away his status as local magistrate by allowing the half-Indian prisoner, William Parker, to escape. Knox couldn’t allow the Company investigators to beat up a prisoner, but he brings shame on his family and barely escapes jail himself for doing the right thing. He loses his position and with it his sense of purpose. All of this leaves him a broken man at the novel’s end.

And so it goes on! We are each of us ultimately alone in a world without mercy according to the mind behind this novel. It’s probably true, but in the interest of preserving sanity, I’m not going to think about it anymore.

One Virgin Too Many - Lindsey Davis

What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from the roads, the aqueducts and decreasing the population of ancient Britain they provided historical fodder for Lindsey Davis’s popular detective novels about Marcus Didius Falco. Falco scrapes a living as a private informer in Rome under the Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian is probably my favourite emperor because he was in charge of the 2nd Legion (stationed in Exeter, you know) and marched around the west country, um... killing my ancestors. I think this gives us a connection.

Like American detectives of the 1950s, Falco gives us a first person narrative of his investigations. He’s an ex-legionary whose tour of duty to Britain (cold, rainy and full of violent, woad-spattered ancestors of the bookclubofone) lurks in his backstory in much the same way that ‘Nam or WW2 do for tough-guy American detectives. This is where Falco’s macho credentials end though. As a good Italian boy, he has an extended family including a domineering mother, spirited girlfriend and slightly bullying sisters to keep him in line. This tends to be what keeps this series in the “cozy mysteries” category. Unlike more morally dubious detectives (like Aurelio Zen, for example ) there is never any doubt that Falco will do the right thing in the end; if he didn’t his female relatives would hound him to the ends of the earth.

In this the 11th book in the series, Falco gets a visit from a six year-old child from one of Rome's foremost families who insists that one of her relatives wants to kill her. Unfortunately, he's in no mood for precocious children, having just come back from telling his favourite sister that her ne'er-do-well husband has been thrown to the lions in Tripoli during the 10th book. Alas, he sends the kiddie packing, only for her to go missing a couple of days later. In the meantime, his girlfriend's layabout brother is trying to get into a religious cult called the Arval Brothers (who sound like Animal House for grown up Romans). He gets blackballed... and then trips over a murdered body while leaving the feast in a big strop, so Falco has two mysteries to solve.

If you are already a fan of the series, well read on as this is much the same as the last couple. If you've never read any of these books, my advice would be to start with The Silver Pigs. That is the first book and I found it much edgier and more suspenseful than most of the others. And Exeter features briefly!