Crime fiction: domestic noir at its most beguilingly chilling

Irish Times

16 hours ago

At the heart of domestic noir lies a profound philosophical question: how well, really, can we know another person? Set in the village of Blarney, Michelle McDonagh's
Some of This Is True
(Hachette Ireland, £15.99) opens with the death of 22-year-old
Irish-American
tourist, Jessie DeMarco, who has travelled to
Ireland
to try to find her birth father.
Did Jessie fall down the Wishing Steps at Blarney Castle early one winter morning, or was she pushed? These questions, and more, come to occupy the minds of Maria Murphy, who is married to Tadhg, and Noelle, the owner of a B&B where Jessie's estranged mother Dani DeMarco stays when she arrives in Blarney to recover her daughter's body.
Outraged when the local gardaí declare Jessie's death an accident without investigating thoroughly, Dani is shocked when she encounters Tadhg – who she knew once as 'Michael', the charming high schoolteacher who made her pregnant when he was teaching in Boston two decades previously.
Rooted in family dynamics and a tightly-knit community, Some of This Is True makes a virtue of its ostensibly prosaic characters (primary schoolteachers, GAA stalwarts, struggling small business owners) largely because McDonagh renders her characters and their concerns in a way that is wholly unforced but grippingly authentic as the women start to wonder how well they know their husbands and sons. Told in a deceptively simple style, enlivened by snippets of blackly comic Cork vernacular, Some of This Is True is domestic noir at its most beguilingly chilling.
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A 'lifetime of guilt and shame' can erode even the strongest of marital bonds, but what could be so shameful as to persuade Wendy, a poet, that her husband Thom needs to die? Might it be the fact that Thom, a tenured academic in a minor New England university, has vague plans to write a mystery novel that reads suspiciously like a veiled confession to murder?
So begins Peter Swanson's
Kill Your Darlings
(Faber, £18.99), which quickly establishes that Thom is a boozy, philandering wastrel who has largely squandered his gifts, and just as quickly has Wendy bump him off, and in a manner that suggests that this is not the first time Wendy has brought an unsatisfactory marriage to a violent conclusion.
The crucial question here is why, and Peter Swanson employs a reverse chronology to tell his story, with each chapter – alternating between Wendy and Thom's points of view – taking us further back in time to the halcyon days when the couple first met as lovestruck teens. 'I just keep coming back to this strange feeling that this is fate,' Thom says, and that reverse chronology certainly gives events the sense of creeping inevitability that characterises the best noir.
Swanson emphasises this mood with nods to The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity (as well as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and multiple mentions of Edgar Allan Poe). The result is a powerful literary noir that picks the bones of a singular relationship, one in which, as Thom puts it, 'we were meant to kill to be together'.
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New crime fiction: Michael Connelly revels in fresh freedom, Brian McGilloway serves up a suffocatingly claustrophobic affair
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A belated sequel to The Woman in Cabin
10 (2016), Ruth Ware's
The Woman in Suite 11
(Simon & Schuster, £16.99) opens with travel journalist Lo Blacklock accepting an invitation to the opening of a luxurious Swiss hotel, where she hopes to score a rare interview with Marcus Leidmann, a reclusive billionaire and one of the richest men in Europe.
Lo hardly has time to settle in, however, before she encounters an old frenemy from The Woman in Cabin 10: the manipulative Carrie Bullmer, who tells Lo that she is being held against her will by the abusive, controlling Leidmann, and desperately needs Lo's help to escape to the UK. Which is how Lo, who once more finds herself 'compelled by some impulse I didn't fully understand … a kind of saviour complex', finds herself in a nightmare scenario and suspected of murder.
A fast-paced treasure trove of conspicuous consumption, double and triple crosses, and imperilled heroines making very bad decisions, The Woman in Suite 11 is as fizzily decadent as a pre-brunch mimosa.
Fresh from delivering the George Smiley Cold War spy thriller Karla's Choice (2024), Nick Harkaway returns with
Sleeper Beach
(Corsair, £20), a blend of sci-fi and the classic private eye novels of Continental Op-era Dashiell Hammett.
Cal Sounder is a Titan, a 7ft tall, medically enhanced uber-human, who is commissioned by the wealthy matriarch Martha Erskine – herself a Titan – to investigate the apparent murder of Ailsa Lloyd in the coastal town of Shearwater, once a thriving fishing port but now the preferred destination of hordes of lost souls – the 'sleepers' of the title – who are broken by poverty and hopelessness, and who travel to Shearwater to sit on its beach and simply wait for death to come.
Complicating Sounder's investigation are two issues: one, the Erskine family pretty much own Shearwater, and two, Martha Erskine privately suspects that she may have murdered Ailsa Lloyd.
What follows, as Sounder starts to realise that Ailsa Lloyd was a labour activist quietly fomenting neo-Marxist revolution, is a brilliantly detailed novel that looks forward to the bleak prospect of policing controlled by 'the secular divine' and backward to those early Hammett novels in which Pinkerton detectives were more likely to be characterised as strikebreakers than knights errant devoted to winkling out truth and justice.
Equally effective as speculative fiction and a classic crime fiction throwback, Sleeper Beach will likely prove the first of many outings for the 'noirish Hercules' Cal Sounder.
Consistently inventive, always seeking to expand the genre's parameters, Sophie Hannah has outdone herself with
No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done
(Bedford Square, £18.99). The sleepy village of Swaffham Tilney in Cambridgeshire is the unlikely setting for a crime fiction yarn that begins with the hapless PC Connor Chantree trying to persuade his boss that the manuscript-of-sorts he has discovered sheds new light on the recent furore caused when Champ Lambert (allegedly) bit Tess Gavey, thus setting in train the sensational events alluded to in the title.
Champ, we discover, is the beloved Welsh terrier owned by Sally Lambert, a woman who is utterly devoted to her canine chum: 'The truth was – and if Sally could change minds in this world about one thing and one thing only, this would be it – being the parent of a dog is exactly the same as being a parent of humans.'
And so, when Champ is accused of biting the daughter of the neighbours with whom Sally is already embroiled in a feud ('on the Hatfield-McCoy level'), there's only one thing for it: Sally, Champ and the entire Lambert family go on the run, aided and abetted by their friendly local millionaire.
Quietly absurd (Champ's plight is compared to the Dreyfus affair and the hounding to death of Alan Turing), and featuring a secondary feud rooted in the crime credentials of Agatha Christie's Mary Westmacott novels (!), No One Would Do … is the proverbial shaggy dog story, a delightfully charming variation on the crime genre which proves that Sophie Hannah could probably rewrite the phone book to entertaining effect.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).