The Wire In The Blood, and The Retribution by Val McDermid

The Wire In The Blood is Val McDermid’s second novel featuring clinical psychologist Tony Hill and DI Carol Jordan.  The first book in the series, The Mermaids Singing, marked something of a change for McDermid; already the author of several popular series of crime novels, she took things in a much darker direction with Mermaids.  The Hill/Jordan books focus on dangerous and sadistic serial killers, with Jordan, Hill and their colleagues often in grave danger.  There’s more emphasis on both the police procedure and the psychological profile of the perpetrators.

The Wire In The Blood features Jacko Vance, a very well-known, very well-liked TV personality who is as famous for his charity work as he is for his TV work.  Beyond his public fundraising work, he also gets involved behind the scenes – he does portering and the like in hospitals, and he spends private time with the sick and the dying.  If that sounds unsettlingly familiar, it should – McDermid has acknowledged that Vance was inspired, at least in part, by the rumours in the journalism world about Jimmy Saville, years before his death and public disgrace.

Vance is a British hero, an ex-Olympic athlete who lost an arm saving a man following a car crash.  He’s driven, motivated – and a psychopath.  This isn’t a spoiler, because The Wire In The Blood isn’t a whodunnit.  It is, in parts, a howdunnit and a whydunnit, and even a did-anyone-do-it, but mostly is an intricate cat and mouse game between Vance and Hill, Jordan and their team.

Tony Hill is setting up a new national profiling team of young and keen police officers, despite some very clear reservations from more senior officers.  He sets his team a paper exercise – to look at a large selection of missing persons cases and see if they can find anything using their new knowledge and skills.  One does – fiercely competitive Shaz Bowman connects a series of missing teenagers with local publicity appearances by Vance.  When the idea isn’t taken as seriously as she would wish, Bowman continues her investigation outside of official channels, with devastating consequences.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, Jordan’s applying some profiling techniques of her own in her new job, and causes some ruffled feathers when she spots a pattern of arson that her team have missed.  Given the book was written in 1997, it’s hardly a surprise that Jordan’s also facing quite explicit, as well as much less overt, sexism from many of her colleagues and seniors.

The relationship between Jordan and Hill is a thing of fragile, painful beauty.  There’s clearly something there, but it seems to be neither properly romantic, nor sexual, in nature.  “Longing” is perhaps the word that springs to mind.  Their relationship seems to be drawing them together at the same time as it keeps them well apart.  There’s so much unspoken here between them.

The Wire In The Blood is violent, and unflinching, and at times painful to read; it’s also gripping and densely-layered and a bloody good read.

 

The Retribution is the seventh book in the series (and McDermid’s 25th novel), and is in many ways a direct sequel to The Wire In The Blood – although many years and four books worth of events sit between them.  I’ve read most, but not all, of the other books in the series, but none of them recently, so I was glad that I’d re-read The Wire In The Blood a few days before starting The Retribution – but McDermid’s mastered the difficult art of giving enough backstory that it’s not strictly necessary to have read the previous books, without weighing down the book with excessive exposition.

16 years after The Wire In The Blood, and Jacko Vance is in prison.  He killed – tortured, raped and murdered – several teenage girls, and he tortured then murdered a police officer.  He was not convicted of all offences, in part because he persuaded a long-term acquaintance – perhaps better described as an unquestioning fanboy – to perjure himself at the trial.  Appeals, human rights cases and a charmed psychologist have left Vance is a relatively good position.  He’s in general population, he’s got the best prosthetic arm money can buy (which means it’s disconcertingly lifelike), and he’s got prisoners who will do his bidding.  Most importantly, he’s about to be given day release for work experience…

Thus begins an even more brutal, vicious and bloody cat-and-mouse game between Vance and Jordan/Hill.

Hill and Jordan are working separately, both facing challenges as usual, but their relationship (such as it is) seems to be on an even keel.  It’s still ambiguous – more than platonic, less than romantic, definitely not sexual.  As an aside, Hill’s impotence is noted as having been an issue for the two of them in the past, and it’s a long-running thread in the series; a motif for Hill’s psychological state and reaction to both his formative years and his chosen profession.

As Vance starts enacting his long-planned, brutal revenge, Hill and Jordan – and the people around them – are facing problems that seem very familiar: senior officers who either don’t support them or act against them, colleagues who doubt their effectiveness in the face of overwhelming evidence, explicit bigotry… it’s notable reading the two books back-to-back how little seems to have changed in the culture of their working environment.

The one element of the book I found puzzling was the B story, involving a series of murders that Jordan’s team investigate.  It felt like a storyline that could have been expanded into the main story of a novel, but here is treated as something of a filler, it’s primary narrative purpose apparently to create a tension between competing demands on the time and attention of Jordan and her team.  But as such, it conversely feels a bit overdone – presumably most Major Investigation Teams handle more than one case at a time as a matter of course?  So it feels like it falls between two stools; not quite done full justice as a storyline in itself, but also something rather more than it needs to be to fulfil it’s purpose.

This book is as least bloody an unflinching as it’s predecessor but the ending is curiously low-key.  After escalating rage and violence, the end comes with little fanfare and something close to banality.  Most challenging to the reader – expectations set by the conventions of the genre – is that the climax of the action takes place “off page”.  The reader and the protagonists find out what’s happened in the same way – someone tells them.  It’s a brave choice, compounded by the emotional climax of the book being equally low key; the fireworks have come before, the end, as with so much between Jordan and Hill, is in the negative space and all that’s left unspoken.

At the time of reading, I felt quite unsatisfied by this state of affairs.  But some time to reflect, and I’m left pondering whether my instinctive reaction was fair.  As with Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Last Rituals, perhaps my reaction is too conditioned by a lifetime’s exposure to the common tropes and conventions of the genre; perhaps it’s not necessary for a whodunnit to be a race against time before the murderer kills again, perhaps a crime thriller doesn’t have to finish with blood and fireworks, but can – like so much of life – happen while we’re looking the other way, and leave us feeling traumatised and bereft rather than happy and fulfilled.

 

There’s two more Hill/Jordan novels waiting to be read, and both are on my TBR pile; I’m looking forward to seeing how McDermid brings her protagonists back from the cliffedge she just apparently shoved them over.

Death, real and imagined

The first of February 2016, and it feels like we’ve already hit this year’s quota for death.  As I write this, the internet is still awash with genuine and heartfelt tributes to Terry Wogan; in the last few weeks we’ve lost David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Lemmy, among others.  And these are just the national and internationally mourned figures.  Dan Hartland writes movingly about the life and recent death of Paul Murphy, a widely respected Birmingham-based musician over at The Story And The Truth; and over on Twitter, a couple of people I follow have both recently suffered family bereavements.

Death, it seems, is everywhere right now.

Of course, in one sense, it always is.  I will confess that I am one of those insufferable people who consider death not only an essential part of the human experience, but perhaps the defining experience.  It’s not just that it’s the one thing we have in common – whether you’re among the dispossessed and excluded or among the one per cent, death is coming to you, and no amount of power, money or influence can change that.  No, it’s more than that.  Every human life is finite, and we only get the one.  If that’s not an incentive to make it count, I don’t know what is.  For me, that’s crucial to the human experience; no do-overs, no re-runs, no go-back-to-the-beginning-and-try-again.  What you don’t learn as you go, you don’t learn.  What you don’t do when you get the chance, you don’t get done.

That doesn’t, for me, mean living every day as if it’s your last.  Mainly because it’s really very unlikely to be, and pretending that actions don’t or won’t have consequences is the way of the toddler, not that of a reasonable adult.

Of course none of that rational belief (is that an oxymoron?) changes the emotional impact of losing a loved one, a respected one, or even just the way that sometimes someone else’s grief gets under your skin and pokes at your own hibernating sense of loss.

So where does the imagined death come into all this pretentious intellectualising I’m doing?  Well, I like crime fiction.  Lots of it, all different kinds, in books and TV and films.  I grew up on Agatha Christie, where – as I once heard it described – lots of people get killed but almost no-one gets hurt, and since then I’ve worked my way through the brutal, the funny, the historical, the bloody and (occasionally) the banal.  One question that gets asked a lot (eg, at almost every crime writing festival I’ve been to in the last five or six years, in various forms) is whether crime fiction readers are a bit fucked up.  Of course, it’s never phrased like that.  It’s euphemised as “is crime fiction becoming too violent?” or handwringing about why publishers put photos of dead women on the covers of crime novels (even when the books don’t have any dead women in them), and a particular fixation with the apparently distressing and confounding idea that women in particular like reading unflinching accounts of brutal murder.  But regardless of how it’s dressed up, it all tends to come across as, well, exactly as I put it before – that crime readers must be a bit fucked up.

I’m endlessly surprised when it’s suggested that reasonably intelligent people must or are likely to be unable to tell fiction from reality.  Quite apart from the breathtaking arrogance implicit in such a suggestion, it’s demonstrably untrue.  And yet, the suggestion is implicit in the questioning of why oh why do people (especially women) read about murder, about death?

Leaving aside the distinctly dodgy gender politics of some of the discussions, I find it baffling that the question gets asked so often.  Is it really that puzzling that people turn to fiction to process an overwhelming experience?  Or a feared, potential experience?  Is it surprising that readers to turn to crime fiction – where some semblance of order is usually brought to the chaos – as a means of reassurance?  I’m not convinced that crime fiction readers are any more (or less) fucked up than horror fiction aficionados or people who enjoy roller coasters.  We seek out safe experiences as a means of understanding, processing and dealing with the fact that life is full of unsafe experiences – right up to and including death, and what may happen just before.

A bereavement can be devastating.  Grief is an involuntary reaction, not a choice (whatever the attention-seekers on the internet try to claim).  Fiction may or may not help us process in the abstract, but it doesn’t change the experience in real life.  Bowie’s death was a surprise and it hurt, Rickman’s death was a shock – and twenty years on, I still miss my Dad.