Review
A Test of Wills by Charles Todd
Headline £16.99
 The boom in historical mysteries continues with this assured first novel, written by an American (and retaining, oddly, a few American spellings) but with a credible and appealing English backcloth. The year is 1919 and the country and its people are recovering only slowly from the Great War. One of the sufferers of the aftermath of combat is Inspector Ian Rutledge, formerly a detective of distinction but now affected by shell shock.  Rutledge has lost his lover and his self-confidence. He is haunted, too, by the voice of a young soldier killed in battle. And, to make matters worse, a jealous superior instructs him to investigate a murder in the Warwickshire town of Upper Stretham, a case which has the potential to ruin Rutledge's career for once and all.
The victim is a widely respected military man, Colonel Harris, and the main suspect is another soldier, Mark Wilton, who had been betrothed to Harris's ward, Lettice Wood. But Rutledge soon finds that there are a good many other people who may come into the frame. Indeed, the size of the cast of characters is one of the weaknesses of the book: there are so many people for the reader to keep an eye on that the culprit is perhaps too lightly sketched. At times, also, the shifts in point of view are a little disconcerting. These are typical weaknesses of an inexperienced writer, but there is more than enough in the book to compensate. Rutledge is an admirably rounded character and Todd carefully paves the way for further investigations (in which the luckless inspector will no doubt again be hampered by his enemy Superintendent Bowles). The atmosphere of the period is conveyed with conviction; it is interesting that although the years immediately after the First World War ushered in the Golden Age detective novel, this era (unlike the Victorian age) has seldom been mined by present day writers of historical mysteries. The plot is soundly constructed and, all in all, this is one of the most interesting crime debuts to have come my way for a number of years.
Martin Edwards

REVIEW
London Blues by Anthony Frewin
No Exit Press £6.99
What a gripping tour de force is  Anthony Frewin's London Blues !
This is a crime thriller at its most refreshingly modern, pushing back the barriers of tradition, conformity, style and presentation.  Breaking the rules and conventions - and  getting clean away with it!
The author cuts back and forth between characters at the beginning, like the talking-heads of witnesses in a drama documentary, before settling down to the main story.
It's told in the vernacular first person and (despite what I've said elsewhere in a review recently how present tense doesn't work) switches tense from past to present with all the skill of a Grand Prix  racer changing gear.  And it's just as fast and thrilling - I devoured it all in a single session.
Take-off is in the very first paragraph: "If Tim Purdon hadn't made all those black-and-white porno movies back in the early 60s he'd probably still be alive today. I mean officially alive..."
The narrator at this point is George, Tim's old school pal, but now a grandfather remembering back to when it all began in the late 50s. When Tim's mother died and his friend set off from the middle-class tedium of Rochester on the Medway to seek his fortune amid the bright lights of London.
This is the London of the Macmillan years, of Maltese gangsters muscling in, of bent-cops, of pre-Beatles and the Cuban missile crisis.
It is a London where the jazz-loving Tim immediately feels at home. He is on the make and going to make it, whatever it takes. And if it takes working in Mr Calabrese's Modern Snax Bar in Soho, so be it. Or helping out a customer, sleazy French Joe, who has a side-line with hard-core photo stills at the going rate of £2.10s a neg - then Tim's your man.
Because, as well as being the dawn of modern pop, this is the dawn of modern porn. When a set of grainy pre-war stills or an out-of-focus 8mm mute movie was the best the punter could hope for. But French Joe is past his best, and when distributor Mr Messalino invites Tim to have a go at taking some pics, the youngster sees it as his chance to make it big. The way youngsters do.
And so the reader is thrust into the embryonic blue movie world, strangely naive and even amusingly amateurish in its day. It's rough, raw territory and any reader who isn't familiar with the language of tits, clits and bums, he or she soon will be.
But author Frewin is never offensive and never drools overlong on explicit sexual detail. Just long enough to draw the reader convincingly into the web and into this authentic and evocative period of modern history. Long enough to chill and haunt as a foppish osteopath named Stephen Ward enters the periphery. Ring a bell? Profumo, Keeler and "Randy" Rice-Davis? And chill it does as one remembers this was the time when the cold war was at its height and the morality of MI5 was an its devilish lowest.
Although surrounded by the tawdry and sordid trappings of Soho, hero Tim breezes through it all with the likeable innocence of youth...we have all been there in one way or another.
This is a remarkable tale, a highly photogenic monochrome film noire on the printed page. If Channel 4 or BBC2 aren't sniffing around, they've missed a trick, and if it isn't at least a nominee for the Daggers Awards life isn't fair.
But, by the time you've read London Blues, you'll already know it ain't. The best read in ages.
Terence Strong

  REVIEW
Hot Toddy by Frank Palmer
Constable £16.99
Hot Toddy is Frank Palmer's eleventh crime novel and his second featuring Detective Superintendent Phil "Sweeney" Todd.
Traditional crime aficionados will not be disappointed with this whodunit - no, more a who's who and what the hell is going on, and by the way whodunit? - which is firmly set in Nottingham.
Originally I found the premise of the story intriguing: Det. Super. Phil Todd is deployed as a last minute substitute when an MI5 case officer disappears whilst hunting a notorious ex-East German Stasi spy master turned blackmailer.
Jurgen Musters is also a master of disguise and is believed to be attending an international conference on tourism and leisure at a hotel near to Nottingham Castle. Two Security Service case officers have been dispatched in cognito to find him. When one of them disappears, along with his personal firearm, someone's pushed the panic button. Foul play is suspected.
That is why plodding Phil Todd, enduring the mind-numbing banality of local routine Special Branch duties, is assigned "undercover" - to provide official police back-up and provide powers of arrest. And when the missing man's body is found stuffed into a drain, thereby causing local flooding, the pace hots up.
All power to the author's research that he got the relationship between MI5 and Special Branch amusingly spot-on and highlighted many of the real-life absurdities and characteristics of both, which are not known to the public at large. (Even big names - like Jack Higgins in Dark Angel, for instance - ignore absolute basics of reality to such an extent that the story requires a total suspension of belief).
Frank Palmer is not guilty of this (although MI5 rarely if ever tote guns) and his character's honest copper approach to the machiavellian world of espionage and his unearthing of entwining intrigues is wryly amusing, engaging the reader with his very ordinariness. Typically, Todd is suffering a cold as he embarks upon this very possibly dangerous mission.
But hereby lies the problem. Phil Todd is so ordinary that, apart from some genuinely amusing observations, after a couple of chapters you've become so bored with him, you don't really care what happens.
To quote Paul Theroux in Riding the Iron Rooster: "It is always difficult for a writer to make virtuous people interesting."
Frank Palmer eschews any of those beguiling human frailties that readers love to identify with in their fictional heroes. He doesn't smoke, drink or gamble; he doesn't beat his wife, he's not torn with grief or self-doubt, he's not a womaniser. He doesn't have a passion for jazz (unless I missed it) or even collect train numbers.
I found myself praying for a cliché - just a small one, please.
The total ordinariness of hero Todd was presumably the author's deliberate intention.  But the end result is, you feel he's the sort of man you'd cross the road to avoid.
Likewise the location.  It is firmly fixed in the confines of a hotel conference, which serves as a stately home or village of former "whodunit" times.  Nothing wrong with that if it cranks up a sort of claustrophobic tension; not so good when it merely enduces yawns.
And I found here yawns aplenty, despite nice cameos like Lord Kenton and the high class hooker Irene who really started to come alive.
Tradition is one thing, but like all fiction, crime-writing must move on and break fresh and exciting ground.  Surely that is the challenge.
Frank Palmer has a mature and engaging style and wit which is not best served here by the infuriating and muddling use of the present tense (what was his editor thinking of!).  It rarely works well except in colour supplement features.
That same editor should encourage his author to spread his wings and fly, to open his characters and locations and widen his horizons to do his undoubted talent justice.
When I first saw the awful jacket, I thought how old-fashioned it was, straight from a 1930s time-warp. Having read it, I can see why.
Constable's editors should be shot for neglecting and failing to nurture this writer. That, after all, is supposed to be their job. Frank Palmer deserves much more than a library sale and an appearance on the shelves of speciality crime bookshops.
Terence Strong  (1997)

REVIEW
No Birds Sing by Jo Bannister
Pan Pbk £4.99 
When I was asked to review No Birds Sing, by Jo Bannister, my first thought was, Oh, hell, I don't like police procedural. But this is not your average police procedural. In fact there is nothing average at all in Jo Bannister's writing.
From the first paragraph she throws the reader off balance; things are not as they seem, or rather, as we assume them to be. The characters, from the saturnine Superintendent Shapiro, through the humorous and level-headed Liz Graham, to the magnificently flawed Donovan, are believable and engaging.
Bannister cranks up a tremendous pace, with ramraiding, rape, robbery and dog-fighting (all by chapter six) stretching the limited resources and straining relationships within the small-town police force of Castlemere.
The action - and there is plenty of it - builds to a series of breathtaking climaxes, achieving something which, in the experience of this reviewer, is far more difficult to evoke in the heart of the reader than laughter or tears: stark, nerve-tingling terror.
I was not entirely convinced by the final discovery of the identity of the rapist, perhaps because I felt there had not been enough earlier intimation as to his true nature. This, however, is a minor criticism, and it is more than made up for by the enthralling final chapters which are guaranteed to hold you spellbound, unable to rest until you know all.
There is compassion and humanity in No Birds Sing, but there is also humour, wit, intellectual challenge and excitement. Jo Bannister has created a densely woven plot and then drawn together the various components subtly, skilfully and with panache.
Margaret Murphy