Spokane, Washington is a city dramatically dissected by its river, the Spokane, in a series of falls and rapids. It boasts a population of 200,000 people, 450,000 taking in surrounding areas, equivalent in size to somewhere between Newcastle on Tyne and Liverpool. Yet, in nine years as a reporter there, Jess Walter covered the activities of no less than four serial killers. Few writers are better placed therefore to understand the public fascination with the form and to recognise how crime fiction, through the superhuman killers and the evermore Gothic crimes of Thomas Harris and the like, has become caught up in a process that Walter has called "a cold war of cruelty."
On Tumbled Graves is a meaty, thought-provoking riposte to this trend. The focus of the book is 36 year-old Caroline Mabry, a Spokane police officer haunted by the one occasion she has used her gun, who whilst working undercover on a drugs bust, fails to rescue a young dealer after a man in khaki pants and a T-shirt has pushed him into the Spokane River. The man is later identified as Lennie Ryan, a hitherto small-time hoodlum. Still later Ryan is linked to two non-serial but brutal killings in the city. There is also Caroline’s mentor, Sergeant Alan Dupree, twelve years older and with his marriage on the skids to whom Caroline is "irrationally attracted!". Fulfilling his role as Caroline’s protector, as he cases the scene of the incident, his attention is drawn to something in the under-growth near the river. It is the body of a young woman, two twenty dollar bills clenched in her decomposing hand. It is the first of several such bodies, all young prostitutes, that are uncovered in the area over the next few days, setting in train not only a full and expert police investigation but also a media circus and the arrival of two competing ‘celebrity’ profilers.
Traditional ingredients perhaps but Walter, writing with great sensitivity, gives them all new and vibrant life. He is a winner on at least three fronts. Firstly, whilst there are digressions (always relevant to his theme) he delivers a strongly credible investigation, encompassing both its detail and its tedium, as well as its lucky breaks and its deductive triumphs. There’s a huge sense too, of a group of people struggling to cope with the human squalor that the job too often throws at them. At the same time Walter always knows when to drop in an incident or twist that will send the reader racing to the next chapter.
Secondly, his observational skills, born out of his years on the street, are always evident, not only in the vividly sketched cityscape and, more importantly, its riverscape but also in its street life, in the dealings for example between prostitute and pimp, hooker and john. Most of all, his characters are complex human beings. Particularly well-drawn is the relationship between Carole Mabry and Alan Dupree. Walter is brilliant on the unspoken thoughts and feelings that hang between individuals, conjuring up both their doubts and uncertainties as they inch toward some sort of emotional accommodation. Indeed across the book, stereotypes are notable by their absence. Even with the comically feuding profilers, acidly drawn, Walter succeeds in reminding us of the humanity lurking (somewhere) below the surface.
In fact Over Tumbled Graves is probably the most compassionate crime novel I’ve read since the Archer novels of Ross Macdonald. It’s also a serial killer novel like no other, insightful and absorbing, and a superb first novel for Walter.