First Cut Is The Deepest by
Martin Edwards
hbk out October 99
Published by Hodder Stoughton
at £16.99
Harry Devlin embarks on an affair with the wife of Liverpool's most
violent villain. But one of their secret assignations is interrupted by
the discovery of a dead man without a head. Well, he has a head, but the
two parts are no longer connected.
Devlin concocts a story for the police, hoping that his mistress's
husband will not discover what Harry has been up to, and perhaps have
Harry similarly separated from his head.
Thus begins the seventh novel in Martin Edward's excellent Harry Devlin
series.
The corpse, it turns out, was a solicitor, like Harry, and when a
second member of the same profession turns up dead, Harry has cause to
worry about his own safety.
Edwards uses quotations from Bram Stoker's Dracula on the title page of
each part of the book and these are echoed in the claustrophobic world
of the Liverpool legal profession. Solicitors, their assistants and
helpers, corporate lawyers and the police together form a small,
insular, closed community, which, in Edwards hands takes on a dark,
brooding atmosphere of interlinked lives all insufferably dependant on
each other. The sense of rivalry, antagonism, love and hatred generated
by the threat to this community sets up a series of tensions that ebb
and flow throughout the narrative.
Harry Devlin moves through a nightmare world in which, from time to
time, we wonder how it is possible for a normal, mild-mannered man to
exist.
Martin Edwards writes the classic detective novel, much in the manner
of Chandler, but he infuses it with an air of gothic, old-world horror
that sets you to thinking it would be better to sleep with the light on.
(
John Baker
- author of the Sam Turner mysteries and one of Britain's most highly acclaimed writers)
First Cut Is The Deepest by
Martin Edwards