The Tattooed Detective by
David Craig
hbk out February 98
Published by Constable
at £15.99
I've always said the Welsh were different. And this exotic and bizarre crime novel set in Cardiff does nothing to change my opinion. This is a police procedural only in the sense that Last of the Summer Wine and Blackadder are both comedies. In the hands of David Craig - better known to crime aficionados as Bill James - it acquires a strange richness all of its own, as well as coppers you fear may be just like the real thing.
It's hard to imagine Morse having four Pre-Raphaelite women tattooed on his torso; difficult to picture Adam Dalglish paying a genuinely friendly visit to a hospitalised pimp; impossible to picture Reg Wexford setting up home in a sex triangle with two prostitutes. Yet DI Dave Brade does all of this, and more, in his idiosyncratic attempts to avoid the city's new dockland developments becoming a haven for ever more powerful criminals.
Arrayed against him are aspiring Godfather Paul Yeo, key players in the London gangland scene eager for a piece of the action, and Julian the middleman who finds himself sucked in far deeper than he intended. Against the backdrop of nightclub brawls and gangland machinations, Brade is confronted with the corpse of a bright young hooker, rapidly followed by the body of local fixer Sweet Bachelor Percy.
Savagely funny and genuinely moving by turns, this is a bubbling brew of a book that flows on a tide of mayhem and outrage to an ambivalent resolution, all the time buoyed up by the wonderful Welsh rhythms of Craig's language. Compelling stuff.
(
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
The Tattooed Detective by
David Craig