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Rayner, Richard

Murder Book

London, Collins Crime, HarperCollins. 357 pp. £9.99.

A woman is raped and brutally murdered. It transpires that her son is a drugs baron. The sleuth is Billy McGrath (half English, half American), the top homicide detective. The drugs baron wants revenge. He knows that the judicial system allows the rich to go free and he offers Billy McGrath one million dollars to let him know in advance who did it. He will then get the man himself.

McGrath has problems. His ex-wife and his daughter are his life and soul and now his ex- wife wishes to leave Los Angeles, taking their daughter with them. The million dollars will solve McGrath's problems. He too knows that the guilty man will get away and this is both a way of seeing justice done and resolving his own problem. He accepts the offer.

McGrath is a complex man. He is a bit of a philosopher (the one-line summaries of great philosophies alone make the book a treat). The past is not another country in this book. "Wisdom is what we glean, if we're lucky, with our minds from the twisted root of the past - so that our hearts can ignore it and proceed at once in the opposite direction." Random events and incidents become important for understanding McGrath, till he understands Epictetus, "Do not desire that everything happens as you wish, but desire that everything happen as in fact it does happen, and you will be free."

He becomes afraid not of what is happening out there in the world he was able to control as a copper, but what was happening to his family and himself, spiritually and physically. Is he getting to be like the criminal who says, "There are laws, but there are no such things as - principles...Only wants. Only needs. Only desires. We live in an era of lies and deceit. Look at the top. Why should I be more particular than the President?"

It is one his despised underlings (how could his wife possibly go away with that man) who says to him, "There used to be loyalty. You take away loyalty, people are just passing through, piss in the wind."

I am happy to tell you that the noir novel is in safe hands today.

Richard Rayner was born in Yorkshire and educated in North Wales and Cambridge. He lives in Los Angeles, which he turns into a state of mind in this book. Bravo!

Reah, Danuta

Only Darkness

London, Collins Crime, HarperCollins. 261 pp. £16.99.

Time was, when on graduation, if you couldn't get a lectureship at a university, a perfectly adequate substitute was a local college. The money used to be good. The hours used to be good. The students used to be good. It was a lot pleasanter than teaching school. Alas, things seem no longer so. (The young heroine gets her redundancy notice a few pages before the end.)

Against the background of a small city college (redundancies and all) Danuta Reah, herself a university lecturer, has set the chilling story of a serial killer. Lisa, Kate, Mandy Julie die, their eyes cut out. The killer has satisfied his needs for a certain length of time after each killing, before the need comes again. The intervals between the killings get shorter and shorter. Then Sarah. Then Gina. Then Debbie disappears. Debbie has something going for her. The college security officer, a position unheard of in the good old days, is in love with her.

The police haven't a clue, in both senses of the word. Mistakes are made, important information is overlooked, but the cops plod on with great and grim determination. All the rescuers make it in the nick of time and Debbie is saved. The stormy English weather helps. Tip: always carry one of those old-fashioned penknives around with you, preferably on a string.

Roome, Annette

Deceptive Relations

London, Collins Crime, HarperCollins. 280 pp. £15.99.

For once, the private life of Chris Martin, a reporter on the Tipping Herald, seems to be on a steady course. All she has to do is keep the editor happy reporting on a row blowing up over Tipping's plan to celebrate the Millennium. The bad guys on the local council consider that if the public is quiet, it means the public is in favour of the plans and how it will be paid for. Only a few complainers write whingeing letters, so the rest must be satisfied. Chris thinks that the right to keep silent is one of the traits of a democracy. But another is the right to know. She delves.

Two deaths, one of which the cops think may be suicide and the other a road rage killing. How come the town's criminal underworld is so interested in what she is investigating? Why do they send a truck to knock down her house? Sherlock Holmes had his three-pipe problems, but Chris Martin is on paracetamol. All these handsome men, she must keep her head (and her heart) straight.

Pure entertainment, and you'll never trust your local councillors.

Annette Roome claims that she started writing in response to early-onset mid-life crisis.

Royle, Nicholas

The Director's Cut

London, Abacus Books, 310 pp. £9.99.

Imagine a film that gets made that nobody ever sees. What does that amount to? Would you haunt its locations if you'd never seen it?

The characters are all film buffs of one sort or another, and unusual. Harry Foxx, the arthouse director whose only feature didn't so much get released as managed to escape. Frank, who gave up making films and became a critic. Richard Charnock who made money out of films but met critical derision. And Angelo, a film-dispatch clerk who embarks on a lonely, obsessive search for the Museum of Lost Cinema Spaces.
A body wrapped in coils of celluloid is discovered on a demolition site. Fifteen years earlier, four aspiring young directors had made an underground film of a man's suicide. Except that the police now establish that it hadn't been suicide!

Seedy London clubs. Magazine offices. Abandoned exhibition halls. Railway depots. But above all, old London film houses. A novel imbued with love of the cinema and unusually cinema houses. Film buffs who remember the old London cinema houses, even old posters will revel in this book (look out for the shop that sells old film posters). There are times when it is impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction, and just as one hopes the narrative is fiction, it gives every indication of being fact.

It is when you come to the end that you are jerked back to the beginning of the book and you wonder about middle-aged love. Surely, it is not an obsession like the film obsessions of the young. Or is it?

A slow but perceptive read. Contemporary noir.

Nicholas Royle formerly from Manchester is a Londoner by adoption