Killers Slipping Through the Net: Murder in a Paranoid Nanny State . . . Christina James’s Fair of Face.

It will strike discerning readers of Fair of Face that the central problem confronting the major incident team, in Christina James’s new and totally gripping torn-from-the-front-page thriller of a double murder on a Lincolnshire sink estate, is their resigned surrender to compassion fatigue induced by the conduct of any number of unconscionable dependants of Benefits Britain they encounter within today’s dystopian underclass. 

‘Don’t be nesh,’ a suspect cautions an apparent accomplice who’s reluctant to enter the crime scene but, before this compelling account of seemingly motiveless malignancy is ended, the reader may be sure they too will share the cold dread that comes from uncommon knowledge of macabre and incomprehensible crimes . . . the killing of a sleeping infant and mother, and a mindless family massacre.

‘We cannot see into the mind of another,’ a celebrated Scottish judge once concluded before sentencing the accused to be hanged for an unusually inhuman murder. ‘The springs of action are hidden. Human personality is such a mysterious thing that one person can never enter into the personality of another. All we can do is judge them by their acts and conduct and by surrounding circumstance.’

His bleak summing-up can be taken as almost a formula for the psychological police-procedural crime novel, which as a genre withholds moral judgement and shuns an authorial point of view with no glib answers forthcoming in denouements that very often, far from unknotting the narrative, tighten the mystery with a further series of unexpected twists. In short, if we consider the prime suspect in any superior suspense novel as a notional conflicted ‘analysand’ in an unresolved case of psychotherapy, then the crime novelists who emerge as the most distinguished open-minded documentarians of contemporary anomic murder will be found to be adherents of that student of early psychiatry, Dr Chekhov, a literary social scientist who declared he had no ideology and no convictions yet denied he was an indifferentist.

Specifically, the objective yet compassionate Chekhovian crime novelist adheres to this author’s belief that what is obligatory for the writer ‘is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly.’ So . . . when the reader is faced with a vicious crime (described relativistically and not by an omniscient narrator), can one be certain of one’s own moral compass to judge?

Self-deception in a speckled mirror.

Such a novelist is Christina James, whose forensically scrupulous prose in her latest DI Yates novel, Fair of Face, the sixth in her crime thrillers, features a methodology that imitates the split-screen effect of diverse testimonies from both the crime team and their suspects and witnesses, all to some degree the depositions of unreliable narrators who are wanting in self knowledge. Even Detective Inspector Tim Yates is revealed as blinkered to his own bad habit of taking the credit for the successes of his loyal Detective Sergeant, Juliet, his ‘unofficial Girl Friday’ cast in ‘the nice tea lady role’, for whom equally there dawns a recognition of damaging character flaws, ‘I stare at my face in the speckled little mirror that hangs over the sink . . . I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve never understood less what I’m doing with my life.’ Loyal readers recognise that James is an astute anatomist of the dynamics of command.

These character flaws not only impede the investigation but are further exemplified by the blundering actions (‘mealy-mouthed do-gooding’) of a number of do-gooders from the Social Services, whose  prickly demarcation disputes between departments compound a bien pensant bureaucratic correctness that amounts to a virtual paranoia consuming the Nanny State. These passages of the novel are social satire of a high order, as if from the pen of a latter-day Zola to skewer petty officialdom’s buck-passing, which in this case fatally sets in motion the final tragedy. The character sketches of a professional child psychologist are the most acute: ‘She’s wearing a mid-calf dirndl skirt and a broderie anglaise blouse with huge puffed sleeves. Her thick blonde hair has been tied back with a piece of embroidered ribbon. She could pass for a very generously-proportioned Coppélia . . .  with an aggressive brand of altruism.’ 

It is to be this fierce self-deluding altruism of the ‘Responsible Adult’ that hinders the investigative interviewing and blinds the investigators in their race to identify the true criminal intent behind the crime.  

Crucially, the DS, Juliet, protests to the child psychologist: ‘You know I’ll have to interview her again. I’d be grateful if you could let me get through it without interrupting. You can see how important it is . . .’
[Child psychologist] ‘My job is to protect her interests.’ She’s gripping the iron bannister rail. Her knuckles are white. ‘If I think the interview is distressing her too much, or causing her to incriminate herself unfairly, I shall insist that you stop.’

(How vivid! The child psychologist ‘was wearing a floor-length red cotton tartan skirt and a jacket with a nipped-in waist (insofar as it was possible to nip in her waist) in a clashing tartan of purple and blue.’ A note to movie producers (and their costume department): the depth and quality of Fair of Face as a suspense drama is positively filmic, as is the intensely sharp focus on its dramatis personae. And for set designers the mise en scène of the death scene is a marvel of concision. ‘There’s not much furniture in the room besides the double bed and a small old wardrobe with an oval mirror set in the door. Otherwise, just a chair with a rounded back that might have started life in a pub. It’s heaped with clothes.’ Started life in a pub. A Jamesian line that fully expresses the desperate hardscrabble times and familial dysfunctionalism of her Provincial Noir milieu. Feckless ‘on-off fathers who wouldn’t take responsibility for their children.’)

In many ways this mapping of tensions between the individual and a paranoid society reminds one of certain polemical works of fiction by Heinrich Böll, his Brechtian-styled political critiques of governmental dogma and the herd mentality of state functionaries . . . in this instance, a paranoid bureaucracy of exhausted, overworked and often demoralised social workers, a breeding ground, as frequent headlines tell us, for errors to multiply. Certainly James’s austere but muscular prose recalls the calculated intention of Böll’s devastatingly incisive reporting style.

James’s striving for objectivity, with multiple viewpoints, deconstructing events with documentary footage, as it were, brings these societal tensions to life with a naturalism that mirrors the inconclusiveness and mysteriousness of quotidian existence and the violent psychical forces that can be unexpectedly unleashed at an underclass’s Ground Zero. 

Lessons will be learnt?

Mercifully, we do not hear the emollient cliché in this novel so often broadcast after tragedies of the gravity explored in James’s fiction; she, as a social realist disdaining sententiousness, leaves it unsaid. (‘It is better to say not enough than to say too much.’ Chekhov.) In real life, after such failures of the Social Services documented in Fair of Face, we are told that ‘lessons will be learnt’, but James’s ‘mealy-mouthed do-gooder’, in his defence, has this to say:  

‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? Every one of the people you mention was responsible for her physical or mental safety, or her day-to-day care, or some other fragment of her life, but no-one wanted to take on board what she had become.’

In other words, too much altruism makes do-gooders blind. It’s smother love. The Nanny State, in smothering, inadvertently kills. 

Predictive plotting.

Astonishingly, the events of James’s novel all too faithfully mirror certain notorious crimes recorded in the British tabloids (Sussex 1985 and Lincolnshire 2016) in so far as her narrative exhibits a very strange aspect indeed . . . the unexplained manifestation of predictive plotting. How is it, readers are going to ask, how is it that the grim epicentre of James’s crime novel – Spalding in South Lincs – was anticipated as the crime scene for a callow nihilistic murder in 2016 of a mother and child while they slept? Given that the gestation of a complex novel of some 300 pages, one would think, can be no less than eighteen months, never mind its production to publication (October 2017), how were the fictive crimes of Fair of Face foreseen, when the double murderers dubbed the ‘Twilight Killers’ killed in actuality in a remarkably similar manner in Spalding in April 2016? 

They say that you can make your own luck, but – the question remains – can a place make a crime? If this is the case, I would not want to be a denizen of Spalding with Christina James as my bard. Like Chekhov’s world, one enters a dimension of no neat answers.

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For a view of the first of Christina James’s crime novels, In the Family (2012), the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series, see Eisner’s blog-post at:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/christina-james-telling-detail-of-her.html

See also, ‘I am a Serial Killer Diarist’ . . . Unremarked Clues to Two Notorious Crime Sprees (John George Haigh and Colin Ireland) . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Christina James: The Telling Detail of Her Panoptic Vision. (In the Family.)

The art of the ‘police procedural fiction’ is supremely challenging and writers who succeed in transmuting the sheer slog of evidence-gathering – often, in truth, months of drudging unproductive investigations – into a riveting dramatic narrative commanding the reader’s intense empathic identification with both the protagonists and antagonists are very rare indeed. One thinks of Thomas Harris or James Ellroy or P. D. James as preeminent in the expression of the verisimilitude of true crime detection characterised by breathless suspense.
http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/in-the-family-9781907773242

Rara Avis.

Such a rara avis is Christina James, whose crime novel In the Family (the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series) demonstrates her deft assurance in sifting the ambiguities of subjective and objective reality, in the personal witness of suspects and detectives alike, as one would expect from the incident room of a by-the-book evidence-based police investigation . . . so, in James’s unique narrative diction for documenting the progress of this baffling multiple murder case, you’ll find style is form and form is style, in every sense of the term ‘form’, particularly. (Felon’s cant included).

It follows, then, that James has borrowed not a little of her unfussy, factual, panoptic narratives from the approved style and disciplines of first-person police incident reporting, prioritised as: Immediate impression of the crime scene faithfully rendered; Raw, direct, undoctored quotation of witness statements; An abundance of minutiae so no specific detail escapes the observer's notice (who knows what observations are crucial to the case?); Concise descriptive clarity to avoid misinterpretation of the report by alert critical readers; Hearsay reported as hearsay, not as evidential fact; Avoidance of over-legalistic or technical terms in favour of to-the-point, fact-based reporting; Honesty in retelling events, even if they reflect badly on the investigator's handling of the case (writing an untrue account may jeopardise the investigation later, or challenge the credulousness of the reader!) to name the principal guidelines observed; nor does the frequency of coppers’ regulation tea breaks pass unnoticed.

So here, exhibited by In the Family, is a triumph of documentary viscerality to relish . . . from the very start you feel you are right there, actively present at the inciting incident (a body in a shallow grave off a motorway slip road) from which the tentacles of the investigation proliferate.

‘Ars est celare artem . . . you might find it useful not to forget that,’ an expert witness reminds us on page 179. And, certainly, James, like the murder suspect of her creation, demonstrates the truism that it takes true art to conceal art and induce in us (and the investigation team) the suspension of disbelief. 

To this end characterisation and mood are augmented by almost preternaturally vivid and palpable evocations of fast-moving action, a super-reality summoned by well-drawn characters realised with the crispest of strokes: An eminent criminal psychologist possesses the ‘elegant angularity of a whippet’; a school’s ‘sea-green thick-rimmed cups’ are remembered from parents’ evenings; fingernails ‘bitten to the quick . . . varnished pillarbox red’; ‘She was already weary of playing hostess to his curmudgeonliness.’ [A Flaubertian sentence of subtle shades and texture!]; ‘She rolled her eyes at him. [It occurred to the inspector] she looked a bit like a mad dray horse herself’; ‘. . . the tiny cockloft of an office . . .’; ‘. . . he indicated some half-rotted apples on the ground.’; ‘. . . ten chocolate ginger biscuits carefully set out in an overlapping circle on a plate.’; ‘He was still loath to invest in proper toilet paper: there was a store of the squares of tissue in which oranges had been wrapped . . .’; ‘. . . the teacup slid a few inches across her slippery pale blue nylon overall.’; ‘. . . she was wearing a crimplene skirt of a curious yellow ochre hue . . . Rather incongruously, her feet were shod in scarlet leather moccasins.’ 

This word-painting with a purpose is of the highest order.

Parricidal Murderesses.

But more than this, our interest is centred on James's entirely novel treatment of avarice as a kind of criminal pathology, recalling the sociopathic manipulative behaviour of parricidal murderesses motivated wholly by greed for insurance payouts or inheritances, such as the notorious Mary Ann Cotton (between 1857 and 1872 she poisoned three husbands, her mother, a lover, eight of her own children, and seven stepchildren) and sisters Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins (executed 1883) for poisoning family members and friends for small insurance settlements; and, more evocatively, from my own deepest darkest Sussex, Mary Ann Geering, hanged from the scaffold at Lewes prison in 1849 for the poisoning of her husband and two sons to gain death and sickness benefits from a Friendly Society, sums described by the defence counsel as so trifling that the jury could not impute so grave a crime to so small a motive.

It is the re-emergence of this sinister kind of cupidity – the kind that covets easy money and abandons received moral codes – which we find so troubling in the 21st century, especially when the motives for such crimes are complicated by familial duress . . . or even influenced by the secret emotional pressures of incestuous consanguinity.

‘It’s brass that interests us,’ one interlocutor of the prime suspect pronounces and one learns that the prime suspect does not disavow her complicity with this view. This is dangerous territory for moralists because, after all, covetousness is numbered among the seven cardinal sins and among the ten commandments so to relabel a ‘sin’ as a ‘pathology’ smacks of fashionable psychosociological revisionism. 

Panoptic 360-degree Neo-docu-novel.

Nevertheless, Christina James – from the 360-degree panoptic vantage of her neo-docu-novel and with the skill of a forensic pathologist – can be said to be reinventing for our times the ‘Fortune-Hunting’ novel of the 19th century (was their any other kind in the Age of Materialism?), wherein the hero and heroine in want of a fortune are invariably named Sterling and Libra.

Please be assured, discerning reader, In the Family is truly an unputdownable novel of disturbingly (and determinedly) acquisitive criminals viewed from the Panopticon of James’s infallible authorial omnipresence by whom the very hairs on the heads of her characters are numbered . . . because, as all lovers of classic detective fiction are aware, it’s the telling detail that counts . . . and here, throughout the chase, you may be certain it is the telling detail that’s spot on.