The Good and Faithful Servant by
Anthony Masters
hbk out February 99
Published by Constable
at £16.99
Anthony Masters is always good value, one of the few crime-writers who work without a formula. His prose is deceptively simple, unadorned, and his characterization is probing, gentle, thorough, like the work of an archaeologist.
The Good and Faithful Servant of the title is an ex Metropolitan Police Officer who has killed his wife and children in a road accident and gone back to work undercover, to infiltrate a family of London crooks.
He's got a new name and a new ID, though the old persona is for ever present, coiled inside him, sometimes elbowing its way forward, threatening to blow an already tenuous and essential cover.
On a deeper level there is an element of a game being played. The characters a writer creates are in a sense alter-egos. They are not the full shilling and could be seen as servants of their creator, masked, and sent forth to accomplish certain limited tasks.
Auntie Vi Cole, who has been left in charge of the family's criminal activities while her husband, Fred, is doing a stint for Her Majesty, is a wonderful creation. A bereaved mother, using food as a substitute for her dead child; a crazed and vengeful adversary to the bastard son of her husband; a big spender with the heart of a lion, and a little paranoia thrown in for taste: that's Auntie Vi.
When a bomb goes off in Fred and Vi's house, the good and faithful servant is plunged into a nightmare world of violence and death, but all is played out in a rarefied atmosphere somewhere between play and reality. This section of the novel is surreal in that it attends to the privileged moments of existence. At break-neck speed everything the undercover policeman has accepted as fixed in his new world is swept away, and a new master steps forward.
The finale lets the novel down, however. And what started as exciting and original retreats into the damp squid of a genre plot.
(
John Baker
- author of the Sam Turner mysteries and one of Britain's most highly acclaimed writers)
The Good and Faithful Servant by
Anthony Masters