Malla Nunn’s first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, was one of my favourite books of last year so I was keen to get my hands on this second, follow-up novel. I’m also counting it towards my Aussie Authors challenge because even though Nunn was born in Swaziland and the book is set in South Africa she lives in Australia and, as is our practice, we’ve happily adopted her as our own.
In the 1950′s it’s eight months since the events of A Beautiful Place to Die and, under South Africa’s increasingly draconian apartheid laws, Emmanuel Cooper has been re-classified as non-white and stripped of his job in the police. He’s had to move to Durban and is working a manual labour job by day and doing undercover surveillance work documenting police corruption at the dockyards for his former boss at night. It’s during his night time work that he stumbles across the body of a young boy, Jolly Marks. Of course investigating deaths is no longer Cooper’s job but he is compelled to work the case anyway. When he is accused of being the one to have committed the crime, and two subsequent murders, he has only a brief window of time to clear his name.
Once again Malla Nunn has delivered a brilliant depiction of a time and place. In the urban setting the harshness of the political situation is even more starkly displayed than was the case with the first book which took place in the remote Jacob’s Rest. With so many routine day-to-day activities now controlled by the myriad of new laws virtually everyone is in danger of doing something illegal at some point and the distrust, paranoia and necessary self-interest this engenders is portrayed here to perfection. There is also a hefty dose of desperation displayed by many characters caught in horrendous circumstances such as having married before the laws came into effect and now learning the marriage is outlawed because the couple are newly classified as different races. What struck me too here was that on top of all the kinds of hell the regime settled upon the civilian population it made the ever-present ‘us and them’ mentality between police and the wider community that much worse because, essentially, everyone a policeman comes across is a criminal of one sort or another. Even an honourable cop struggles to deal with that.
Characterisations are Nunn’s other great skill. I liked Emmanuel Cooper even more than in the first book though he is not always a likable human being. But as a character, flaws and all, he is the sort of person who leaps off the page. Experiencing first hand the plight of being classified out of the self-appointed ruling race and losing his job, the main thing by which he defines himself as a human being, make Cooper lose some of his confidence and sense of self-worth. He seems even more haunted by the phantom of his former Sergeant Major and is generally not functioning at his best but he strives, not always successfully, to do no harm to others, especially when the two friends he made in Jacob’s Rest come to town to help him. There isn’t a single standout villain here but there’s a criminal under
As far as story goes I found the middle section a bit woolly with a couple of complications too many. Apart from Cooper, who simply can’t let the dead lie, no one seemed to care much about the murder victims because they were too busy worrying about themselves (not without good reason I admit) or, in the case of the cops, were focussed on ‘getting’ Cooper. For a while the story lost its way a little though it ended strongly with a nail-biting but believable climax.
Emmanuel Copper is certainly not the first flawed protagonist in crime fiction but I find him unique in terms of the experiences he’s endured and I’m left wanting to read more about him. And while this is too confronting a setting to be considered a comfort read it is superbly drawn and, alas, all too believable. I heartily recommend this book though would suggest reading A Beautiful Place to Die first to get a full sense of all that Cooper has had and lost before becoming who he is in this novel.
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My rating 4/5
Publisher Simon & Schuster [2010,]; ISBN 97814116586227; Length 382 pages
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Let the Dead Lie has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction and you might also want to read my review of A Beautiful Place to Die
The short answer is no. I don’t read graphic novels. I’ve read one, a re-print of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God that was originally published in the 70′s but was re-printed a few years ago. And I only read because someone gave it to me as a present and waited patiently for my opinion. Thankfully I wasn’t writing reviews then because I would have struggled to come up with much more than the “it was nice” I said to my generous but slightly misguided friend.
It is several months since he was nearly killed in an explosion and DS Andy Dalziel is officially back at work though there are doubts, both in his own mind and in others’, about whether he is quite the operator he once was. One morning he wakes up and rushes to work thinking he is running late only to realise en route that it’s Sunday and his day off. He calls into a Church, to confirm his suspicion about the day of the week, where he is approached by Gina Wolfe. She is the current girlfriend of a London cop Dalziel knows and, on the advice of her boyfriend, she asks Dalziel’s help in determining whether her husband, who disappeared seven years ago and was presumed dead, is really living in Yorkshire. In parallel we meet Goldy Gidman, former gangster turned corporate success, whose main goal in life now is to ensure that is son David, currently a Tory MP, continues his successful political career unhindered by anything including his father’s shady past resurfacing. Over the course of a single day these two threads then intertwine in a myriad of ways.
I read this book because 
Inhuman Remains is this month’s discussion book for my face to face book group.
When some bones are discovered in marshland at Norfolk DCI Harry Nelson calls on the expertise of forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway to date them. Nelson is hoping they are the bones of a child who disappeared 10 years previously in a case that still haunts him. Disappointingly for Harry, though excitingly for Ruth, the bones turn out to be of an Iron Age girl and she is able to initiate a new archaeological dig in the marshes. Based on his assessment that Ruth is smart and probably knowledgeable about the academic references within them Harry asks Ruth to take a look at some taunting letters he received relating to the girl’s disappearance. Before much headway can be made though another young girl goes missing and both Ruth and Harry are caught up in the events.
