Andrew Rosenheim | The Spectator columnists & writers

Cosy crime flourishes in the pick of the summer’s thrillers

Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like an Escoffier chef with a private penchant for Mars Bars. It has always proved a great getaway in tough times, which helps explain the extravagant success of Richard Osman’s novels. Murder Before Evensong by the Reverend Richard Coles (Orion, £16.99) follows on Osman’s heels, with the advantage of it being both a more interesting story and a better writer telling it. It begins with an array of clichés, a feature of the cosy genre. Daniel Clement is a man of the cloth, tending the rural flock of a small village whose church’s living is in the hands of the local estate’s predictably irascible squire.

The real Norfolk: Stewkey Blues, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed

D.J. Taylor is a Norfolk native who, un-usually, has stayed put. These stories, written during the pandemic, are all set in that county, though the author is largely uninterested in its more fashionable acreage – the strip of coast so popular with Sunday supplements and London owners of second homes. He writes instead about the ‘other’ Norfolk, which is comparatively unmonied, flat as a map, and barely gets a look-in from the SUVs speeding north. Most of these stories feature men, often young men, though in ‘New Facts Emerge’ a harried City businesswoman finds her Christmas plans imperilled by the obstructions of a sexist superior. She finally snaps when the colleague’s soullessness and the grind of the commute from Diss push her past breaking point.

Character is king in the latest crime fiction

Thriller writers are hard pressed to stand out in what’s become a very crowded field. As a result, from Cardiff to Kansas we meet every conceivable kind of detective: if one walks with a telltale limp, another has no legs at all. Even the requirements of diversity can’t disguise the desperation of the search for distinctive heroes, or how variety itself has become a convention. Simon Mason’s A Killing in November (Quercus, £14.99) begins with more than a nod to thriller traditions. It’s set in the fictional Oxford college of St Barnabas, with a grumpy provost wooing a corrupt Middle Eastern potentate, a college servant with a hidden agenda and, naturally, an unknown woman found strangled in the provost’s office.

Suspicious circumstances abound in the latest crime fiction

The old adage that everyone has a novel in them has a new version: anyone can write a thriller. Celebrity helps, of course, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are exemplars of the trend, though each has had the sense to draw on professional assistance and the grace to acknowledge it. Closer to home, Britain has spawned its own unexpected authors, led by Richard Osman with his astonishing successful The Thursday Murder Club. Now Alan Johnson, the former Labour MP and cabinet minister, joins the club with The Late Train to Gipsy Hill (Headline, £16.99), his first foray into fiction. He arrives with impressive credentials, however, having published three excellent volumes of memoirs since leaving politics. Like them, this book is well written, if less affecting.

A master of spy fiction to the end — John Le Carré’s Silverview reviewed

Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by John le Carré less than a year after his death seems almost suspiciously opportune, but whatever the publishing expediency involved, it is a very fine finale. Julian Lawndsley is the 33-year-old owner of a bookshop in an East Anglian seaside town, having fled the City, where he has made both his fortune and his name asa canny trader. Any echoes of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald soon fade as we discover that Lawndsley knows virtually nothing about books and even less about the customers he sells them to — until Edward Avon, an exotic foreigner, enters his shop one evening. The bookseller’s interest is initially piqued by Avon’s claim to a boyhood friendship with Lawndsley’s late father, a sex-mad vicar long ago defrocked after announcing one Sunday to a startled congregation that God does not exist.

Nazis and Nordics: the latest crime fiction reviewed

Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were almost exclusively interested in Nazis and Nordics. Certainly there seems no diminution in these twin tastes. Widowland (Quercus, £14.99) by C.J. Carey (a pseudonym for the writer Jane Thynne) is the latest Nazi-related novel in a crowded field, and its author wisely opts for a different, if not altogether original, conceit. An alternate Britain which lost the war has featured in fiction before — notably in Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Len Deighton’s SS-GB — but even with such celebrated predecessors, Carey more than holds her own. The world of her novel is richly detailed, full of atmosphere and — on the terms of its own make-believe premise — entirely plausible.

Secret treaties and games of cat and mouse: a choice of recent crime fiction

Almost any promising writer of spy fiction can expect at some point to be called the ‘next Le Carré’, an accolade even more promiscuously applied since the death of the master. James Wolff has immediate credentials to jump the queue, since, like Le Carré, he uses a pseudonym and claims to work at the Foreign Office — though his familiarity with surveillance techniques suggests a slightly different employer. How to Betray Your Country (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99) arrives as the second in a planned trilogy, hard on the heels of Wolff’s striking debut, Beside the Syrian Sea. August Drummond is a former British intelligence officer, cashiered for insubordination after the sudden death of his tricky but entirely beloved wife.

Carrying on loving: Elizabeth Hardwick’s and Robert Lowell’s remarkable correspondence throughout the 1970s

Since Robert Lowell’s sudden death in 1977 his critical reputation has suffered from the usual post-mortem slump. Interest in Lowell’s life, however, remains as strong as during his celebrity heyday, when he graced the cover of Time magazine and marched on the Pentagon with Norman Mailer. A biography (excellent, by Ian Hamilton), an edition of his letters, and a volume of the correspondence between Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are all firmly in print. Now we have The Dolphin Letters: 1970–1979, which includes both Lowell’s letters to his wife Elizabeth Hardwick (during and after the dissolution of their marriage) and her letters to him, long thought to have been lost or destroyed. The disruption at the heart of this collection of correspondence began when Lowell came to England in April 1970, first as a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford, then as a don at Essex University.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

America has always idolised its entrepreneurs, even when it has proved a thankless task — if you can glamorise Bill Gates, you can glamorise anyone. Especially Steve Jobs, whose death from pancreatic cancer has been greeted as the loss of Mammon’s Messiah. Is any of this justified? Well, yes and no. Jobs did as much as anyone, with the possible exception of Gates, to bring digital change into the mainstream, and this makes his biography as much a history of a digital revolution as a personal story. It’s this fittingly binary quality that makes Walter Isaacson’s biography so worthwhile, since Jobs himself emerges from it as an unattractive, even repellent character.Jobs grew up in the engineering belt just south of San Francisco which became Silicon Valley.

A menacing corruption

E. L. Doctorow became an American household name with the publication of Ragtime in 1975. It was a jaunty book (later a successful movie) which lightened an American mood darkened by the lingering war in Vietnam. It benefited from having authentic historical figures — Harry Houdini and J. P. Morgan among them — interspersed with its fictional cast, a device that seemed a marvellous novelty at the time, though today it has become a wearingly common convention. In this new collection of Doctorow’s short fiction, most of the stories are also set in America (with one exception), but the range of subjects is impressively eclectic. In ‘Heist’ a Catholic priest hunts through a secular Manhattan for a cross that has been stolen from his church, finding help in the unlikely form of a rabbi and his wife.

A far cry from Dr Finlay

If he is remembered at all, A.J. Cronin is known now for Dr Finlay’s Casebook, which ran for many years on both BBC television and radio, and today resonates with the glow of a gentler past — when a GP happily made house calls, delivered babies, and served as shaman, shrink and confessor to his rural community.If he is remembered at all, A.J. Cronin is known now for Dr Finlay’s Casebook, which ran for many years on both BBC television and radio, and today resonates with the glow of a gentler past — when a GP happily made house calls, delivered babies, and served as shaman, shrink and confessor to his rural community. Cronin’s association with these programmes was actually relatively loose. They were based on an early collection of stories, and most of the broadcasts were original commissioned scripts.

Bad enemy, worse lover

Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing.Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. It’s less likely to boost his reputation as a man. Bellow was never humble about his talents, and the surviving early letters show an intellectual precocity leavened by the vernacular of melting-pot Chicago. Yet initially he was reluctant to plumb home-grown strengths for his work. His first two novels were constructed on what he called a ‘Flaubertian model’ — modest, polished efforts, which were critically well received but sold poorly.

Diary - 27 August 2004

Pentwater, Michigan This is America’s heartland, the ‘flyover country’ usually seen by British visitors only from an aeroplane window as they head west for the coast. It’s a land of other people’s clichés — home of the moral majority, the background for Norman Rockwell paintings, a series of cowpoke towns which lie flat as a map from the Adirondacks to the Rockies. Which makes it such a surprise when visitors to the Midwest — especially this northern part — discover how beautiful it is. In this one county of mid-Michigan there is rolling orchard land, the start of the pine and hardwood forests that stretch north through most of Canada and, on the shores of Lake Michigan, a 150-mile stretch of white, soft sand. And everywhere there is water, which makes it resemble Scandinavia more than the Continent, and explains why surnames like Gustafson and Lonergan vie with Smith for space in the phone book.

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