The Suffocating Night by
Andrew Taylor
pbk out May 99
(NEL)
There are three writers inside Andrew Taylor (at least). There is the black farceur who writes about the amoral academic, William Dougal, hero of his first book, the delightful Caroline Miniscule. There is the sombre explorer of the dark reaches of the human spirit who has given us so far two deeply ponderable volumes of his backwards-told Roth trilogy. And in the middle of those two there sits his fictional town of Lydmouth in the 1950s, with all the titles of the series significantly picked from Housman's A Shropshire Lad.
This is the fourth of them. Talking about it at the launch in Mysterious Bookshop, he forecast there might be more than a couple of others to come before the affair between the detective, Inspector Richard Thornhill, and the local rather classy journalist, Jill Francis, will end in tears. There are some tears already in this story, but laughter, even loud laughter, as well. Because Taylor puts before us the whole life of his typical town of those times. We hop from character to character as the story grippingly goes by. The book passes the should-be-doing-something-else test with flying colours, not a who-done-it puzzle from the Golden Age but, emerging from the meshes and muddles of life, a gradual unravelling from a wholly contemporary writer.
Each person into whose shoes and mind we enter, almost without exception, rings altogether real, even the fox which has its two necessary pages, a little reminiscent of the hound into whose mind Tolstoy goes for twenty or more pages in War and Peace. The town, too, gets to seem a real place, its streets named and evocatively described. And the distant days of the Korean War are equally brought to life in dozens of well-researched details (Taylor said at the launch that for him this was an historical novel) from the ubiquitous cigarettes, to the hair-oil the hero uses and the mandatory cooked breakfasts everyone consumes. We live in Lydmouth.
The Suffocating Night by
Andrew Taylor