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Gano, John

Inspector Proby in Court

London, Allison & Busby. 213 pp. £5.99.

There is a violent post office raid. The raiders are desperate and shoot their way out with fatal consequences. There is a police pursuit, one of the policemen is gunned down and one of the raiders is trapped on a rooftop. Inspector Proby emerges on the roof. It is empty. He inches his way to the edge and peers over. Two hundred feet above the ground a man clings to a piece of metal spouting. He appeals to Proby to save him. Proby stretches his hand out to grasp the man. The man slips and falls to his death.

The raiders had been members of the same army unit. They had been brave under difficult conditions. Their former CO won't believe they were murderers and thieves. Nor do the civil rights citizens. A private prosecution is brought against him. Proby is accused of murder, taking the law into his own hands. Wherever he goes, everyone takes a dig at him.

Proby is in the middle of another murder investigation and his superiors refuse to suspend him. In a local clinic the director wages a ruthless campaign of sexual harassment, knowing times are hard and no nurse will take any action and risk her job in a time of unemployment. Proby's girlfriend whom he loves very much despite her affairs wants to adopt a baby. With his reputation in ruins, the adoptions social worker won't even speak to him.

All comes nearly right in the end.

A true to life whydunnit police procedural.

Gano, John

Inspector Proby's Christmas

London, Allison and Busby Crime. 184 pp. £5.99.

The run-up to Christmas in England is not unlike the run-up to Passover in Israel, a period of absolute balagan (Hebrew=disorder).

In this period of total confusion someone starts murdering attractive ladies. Inspector Proby's well-known and trusted (even by his superiors) instinct tells him who the murderer must be. There are a number of problems. For various reasons he cannot depend on his men. The murderer he suspects has top security clearance, a training expert on assassination and how to eliminate all traces of it and (here it comes) the lover of Proby's wife. Proby's superiors think that just this once he ought not to be on the case.

Outwitted?

No, because he decides to offer himself as bait.

Anyone discovering their partner is having an affair ought to read the conversation between husband and wife when he tells her he knows, but ...

John Gano is the pseudonym of Freddie Stockdale, a former farmer and founder of Pavilion Opera. He was a prison visitor.

Gash, Jonathan

Die Dancing
A Dr. Clare Burtonall novel.

London, Macmillan. 344 pp. £16.99.

"She could dance any time. Chained to Bonn for life, she'd never before felt freedom"

"Dr Clare Burtonall stood nervously on the dance floor of the Palais Rocco. Her tweed skirt and pastel blue twinset felt absurdly wrong. To be with Bonn, her hired lover, felt absolutely right. It was really their first time together in public. She had no compunction about coming dancing after an autopsy. It was a kind of freedom." Thus begins the third of the Dr. Clare Burtonall novels, the one with probably the ultimate Women's Lib. Well-to-do professional ladies, dissatisfied with their husbands, are able to hire a gentleman (referred to as a goer) and a hotel room from the Pleases Escort Agency, also run by a lady, who had inherited the business from her father.

While Clare Burtonall is on the dance floor a local fixer nicknamed Dulsie (short for Dulworth) is dying very slowly and this scene is not for the squeamish. Amongst the people he fixes things for is Dr. Burtonall's husband.

As if this isn't problem enough, Dr. Burtonall is unaware of the fact that a new medical practice she has recently set up has the Pleases Agency behind it.

The police are represented by Detective Inspector Hassell, leading the murder investigation. Inevitably, she is going to be asked some awkward questions especially as she had shown interest in some young and handsome (murdered) bodies. And then there is Bonn. Dr. Burtonall is madly in love with him and the rules of the Agency she has hired him from are no public displays of affection.

Will she get away and what will she get away with?

Jonathan Gash is also the author of the Lovejoy novels.

Gill, Bartholomew

The Death of a Joyce Scholar

London, Allison & Busby. 391 pp. £5.99.

Dublin's most eminent Joyce scholar, Kevin Coyle, is stabbed through the heart near Glasnevin Cemetery. His wife and some friends take his body home and put him to bed. He starts going off in the heat, so she sends for Dublin's other celebrity, Garda Inspector Peter McGarr. Missing is Kevin Coyle's most prized possession, a hat originally worn by James Joyce. (McGarr's next door neighbor is Rabbi Viner, a Dubliner by birth and sensibility, who sets the tone of the book at the start when he says, "Haven't we all a touch of mayhem in our hearts?" And mayhem it is.)

In amongst the mayhem men try to understand the hearts of women, or try to ignore their hearts, women try to understand the hearts of men, or try to ignore them too. What does an unattractive woman policeman do when she falls in love with the Adonis of the local garda, cannot live without him and cannot forget him? Like Molly Bloom in Ulysses she wants to be embraced twenty times a day. Unlike Molly Bloom she cares who does it, if only once. What does middle-aged McGarr do, married to a much younger woman, probably at least as intelligent, certainly more educated, a feminist, wanting a baby?

The world seems to be divided into those who have read and understood both Joyce and Beckett, and those, who like McGarr and your reviewer, haven't read either. To solve the murder, McGarr must understand both authors, so these have to be explained to him, sometimes with great patience, and at others, on the run, so to speak. If you have been unable to read either Joyce or Beckett, this is the book for you, and if you are a Joyce fan, you will revel in this book. The revelations about Joyce and Becket and Becket's non-use of language, for those of us who do not appreciate Waiting for Godot are an Irish feast, drink and food and all.

So is the cast of characters, the mystery and the solution.

Bartholomew Gill is the pseudonym of Mark McGarrity, an Irish American. The pseudonym is from his grandpa, the storyteller, and the sleuth is named after his other grandpa.

Gill, Bartholomew

Death of an Ardent Bibliophile

London, Allison & Busby. 329 pp. £5.99

The ardent bibliophile is Brian Herrick. He was Keeper of the Marsh Library, owned a fine home where the library was intended to look like the Marsh library. He regarded himself as a latter-day Jonathan Swift. In his own mind he became Swift and inherited Swift's foibles as well. The key to understanding the characters lies at the end when Gill quotes Swift, "Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, make us weaker ever after."

The sleuth is Peter McGarr, chief superintendent of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Irish police.

The stage is Dublin, Dublin characters for the most part, Dublin speech and Irish literature. It is the sort of mystery novel which does entertain, but also sheds new light on an author and his works (in this case the author of Gulliver's Travels). The passions of collectors, literary forgeries, unroll before us as the investigation proceeds and uncovers what Herrick had hardly bothered to keep secret. Even his porno films had to have some literary affiliation!

A comic, tragic and literary mystery.

Born in America, Gill graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. There are now over ten McGarr mysteries.

Gill, Bartholomew

The Death of Love

London, Allison & Busby. 394 pp. £5.99.

We all know that governments borrow beyond the limits of our (sic) capacity for repayment. How does this happen and what are the implications?

The victim is Paddy Power, a widely read and thoughtful man, an international banker who has benefited from the borrowing Ireland could not afford. Power saw the light, and wished to atone. Was his death an accident? Was he murdered? If he was murdered, were his plans to save Ireland from the consequences of the loan what motivated the killer (who would have to disgorge some of his own ill-gotten gains)? Or was there a personal motive, the result of Paddy Power's romantic misalliances? What about his own personal ambitions? After all, behind closed doors he could gather people to further his own ambitions, for good or evil. Did the premier himself feel threatened?

Unheroic looking Peter McGarr, investigator-extraordinary, has a personal dilemma. He is about to become a father, and he would like his future offspring to be proud of him. He is presented with a Faustian offer: sell your soul and you can reach any heights in the police service.

A warts-and-all glimpse of Ireland.

Bartholomew Gill, Irish-American, graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, makes his observations on Ireland's troubles with subtlety and by insinuation.

Goodwin, Tim

Seeds of Destruction

London, Constable Crime. 238 pp. £16.99.

More and more the contemporary crime novel takes on different guises. The past. Character. History. Philosophy. Travel. All are subtly and skilfully woven into the mystery and detection.

Sergeant Tomas Larsen has to travel over the Greenland ice-cap to a place nobody would ever want to go to, Sermilik. That's where he escaped from decades ago and how he returns to solve what appears a straightforward case. A wife is thought to have stabbed her husband. There is a violent scene on the plane at the beginning of the book, which sets the tone for the rest of the book. It is going to be more than a simple case of a wife sticking a knife into an errant husband. And it is.

Sermilik has a high death rate. An insular population. Massive unemployment. Drink. Families are torn apart. Racial tension. (Larsen himself is of mixed race). Resentment against Danes and Denmark. Sermilik is cut off from the rest of the world by an airline strike.

There is also the seed bank. The seed bank contains deep-frozen seeds from all over the world. The government wants to get rid of it. Who is it that wishes to lay hands on it? Why is the investigation being hampered and Larsen chased across the ice like a hunted animal? His past rears itself and literally and metaphorically hits him in the face.

In the background of the book lies Greenland, its great virgin ice-fields, enwalling mountains, flickering multi-coloured curtains of the aurora, great blue-green bergs, the tiny spring flowers in crevices. Its religion and culture may be in the process of being destroyed, but the land is still unspoiled. Its people might have to migrate elsewhere for work, but the land they will never forget.

Neither will you.

Tim Goodwin has worked at many occupations and now lives with his family in Dorset. This is the first Sergeant Tomas Larsen mystery.

Gur, Batya

Literary Murder
A Critical Case

New York, HarperCollins, 1993. 357 pp. $20.00

Divorced, trying to maintain a relationship with his son, vulnerable, defensive, a problematic love life, defensive about his academic achievements, showing one face to his peers, seen differently by superiors (often jealous of him), handsome, a heavy smoker, successful with the ladies, Inspector Michael Ohayon has his own philosophy: to enter the essence of things. Here and there, through his eyes, there are vistas of Jerusalem and the stunning vista over the Old City.

It is no longer enough for a crime novel to amuse, entertain and beguile us. There must be an "extra" something for us to think about when the journey is over and the book has been put away. And that is where Batya Gur is at her best. In a previous book, Saturday Morning Murder, Inspector Ohayon has to understand psychoanalytic theory to solve the murder and we are told enough for us to understand both theory and its involvement with the crime.

At the heart of this book lies literary theory and the book begins with a seminar on the subject. If you haven't been paying much attention to it the first time round, you will certainly come back to it near the end as the realisation dawns that it matters ... it matters!

Like her sleuth, Batya Gur, who is a literature teacher, lives in Jerusalem. In addition to writing crime novels, she frequently comments on public affairs.