Tangled Web UK Review July 2008
All the Colours of Darkness by
Peter Robinson
hbk out August 08
Published by Hodder
at £16.99
I wonder why so many British crime writers use such a similar format as having a dour, Gordon Brown-type DCI/DI who is widowed/divorced and is having an affair with a woman DI/sergeant/journalist? I suppose as publishers now want longer books, as compared to the mere 50K-word Agatha Christie type, there needs to be much more peripheral story-line than a simple murder or two.
Peter Robinson’s DCI Alan Banks and his DI Annie Cabbot is of that ilk, but he is such a good writer that this scenario is part of the attraction. Actually, Annie is ex-girlfriend, but obviously still has yearnings in that direction.
In the new Banks story, based as usual in Yorkshire, he uses the theme of Othello to construct his plot, as a rich homosexual is battered to death by his lover, after having been inflamed by revelations by a third party that the first chap has been playing away down in London. The killer then hangs himself, but it turns out that the murderee was a retired MI6 agent - or possibly not so retired.
Banks gets involved in the investigation, which is soon classed as an open-and-shut murder-suicide, but refuses to lay off, even though he is heavily leaned upon by his superior officers and then threatened by the security services. Though Yorkshire-based, he spends much of the book in London, bedding his elegant new girl-friend, but even that goes pear-shaped when MI-something-or-other toss her apartment and put the frighteners on a woman private-eye who took photographs of the agent’s supposed indiscretions.
Jolly good writing, though I think the plot of this one stretches one’s credulity a bit far - I get the feeling that Peter Robinson is having a go at the excesses of the burgeoning British police state in its high-handed dealings with the powerless public.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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