Tangled Web UK Review July 2000
Where Roses Fade by
Andrew Taylor
hbk out June 00
Published by Hodder & Stoughton
at £16.99
Books set in the past, particularly if it is the reachable past (Any time when men wore trousers?), always seem to have a plus of sturdiness about them. It is as if, without any extra effort, they achieve a depth of understanding which only the very best writers reach to in novels, crime or otherwise, with a contemporary setting. Such an understanding has always been a feature of the novels Andrew Taylor has set in the imaginary town of Lydmouth in the years immediately after World War Two, of which Where Roses Fade is the fifth.
Here are all the differences between Britain in those days and Britain now, the cigarettes everyone smoked all the time, the widespread reticence about sex (and, yes, the rather less of it that went on), cricket bulking larger than winter-only football, the telephone the chief means of communication. Andrew Taylor has a keen nose for, not what is just in the past, but for what marks out those different days from ours.
But there is more to the book than the pictures of the past. There are its people, little different from us today of course, but all the more interesting for being people (rather than the characters of a novel). They are people - at the start one may feel too many of them, but wait - whom one can understand and sympathise with. Even when they are hardly sympathetic Andrew Taylor sees into them so far that we in turn see why they are unlikeable. More, when they are strongly sympathetic yet behave in a way we hope we would not, we still know why.
People such as these enable their creator, too, to carry out one of the unwritten promises the crime writer makes to the reader. Since even the best of these people can behave at times in a way that seems to run contrary to the picture we have of them at first, there are opportunities for the twists and turns of plot. And splendidly the book seizes them, pointing now this way, now that, to the possible murderer at the centre of the story. It is playing with us. But that sort of game, though the Agatha Christie books which the Lydmouth folk might have been reading are now far in the past, still works its legitimate magic. So, as you read, at an ever-increasing pace, the last pages in which the various people we have met come at last to a now-it's-him, now-it's-her climax you will find yourself desperately and delightfully dazzled.
More importantly than all this, however, Andrew Taylor puts the facts and observations from those distant days, together with the differing people he presents to us, into a story. It is a story that leads you on and on till the book's very last page. Not, however, to its final paragraph. That runs to only two lines, but it brings a discreet promise of yet another Lydmouth novel to come. I wait anxiously.
(
H.R.F.Keating
- 1996 Cartier Diamond Dagger winner & creator of Inspector Ghote)
