The Wolfe of West End Central: Review of The Murder Man by Tony Parsons

The Murder Man by Tony Parsons (Minotaur, October 7, 2014. International Edition published by Century, August 2014, under the title The Murder Bag)

The Murder Man is the first crime novel by well-known British journalist and author Tony Parsons. If you're familiar with his work, you'll see that some patterns are repeated, among them that the protagonist is the single father of a young child.

Detective Constable Max Wolfe lives across from London's Smithfield Market with his five-year-old daughter, Scout, and their new Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, Stan. (Conventional wisdom is that the ideal dog name is two syllables, with a vowel ending, but I love the idea of a cute little sad-eyed, long-eared spaniel named Stan.) Father and daughter are close, Stan is learning about his new home, and all is well, except for the absence and sadness that can sometimes be heard softly echoing around their loft apartment's large spaces.

On the job, Max is a bit of a maverick. But not maverick as in the alcoholic, self-destructive, villain-whispering genius we see so often in today's crime fiction. Max is just a very good cop who sometimes lets his humanity and his inborn sense of duty make him a little bit deaf to orders and the rule book. Just enough of a maverick to have made it seem like a good idea to him to transfer out of anti-terrorism to homicide, to London's West End Central station on the famed Savile Row.

It looks like Max has landed in a good place, with congenial colleagues and a good mentor-type guv'nor, Detective Chief Inspector Malory. His first day on the new job is a shocker, as the team is called to the scene of a homicide in the high-rise office of a posh banking executive, where they find him dead from a brutal, but expertly-applied throat cutting.

Once similar killings reach the magic number of three, we have a serial killer, which not only changes the priority of the investigation, but sends the news outlets and the social media into an orgy of 24-hour coverage. The victims are sons of privilege, which is a wonderful hook for the news stories, websites and tweets, who characterize this as kill-the-rich class warfare and whip the public into an almost celebratory frenzy over the killer the cynical media are calling Bob the Butcher.

Because author Parsons begins the book with a short prologue from 1988––a scene of appalling sexual violence––we know the "whydunnit" of this mystery before the detectives do. This is a daring choice by Parsons, because it could make the reader feel the sleuths are slow on the uptake. But that doesn't happen here. Max and his team are smart and capable, quick on the scent.

Both Tony Parsons and Max Wolfe
like to relax with a spot of sparring

Also, Parsons is writing much more than a whodunnit here. This is very much a character-driven and issues-driven story. Max is human; tough, but also vulnerable, likable and funny, and even a reader like me, who dislikes reading too much about a detective's domestic situation, found Max's family life a plus to the story. Parsons interweaves the plot with issues of privilege, power, inequality and media manipulation. The story is also imbued with a powerful sense of place. Locations include Scotland Yard's Black Museum, its private museum of murder history, complete with weapons and relics going back to Jack the Ripper; the boxing gym Max frequents; Smithfield Market; a posh boys' school in the country.

Tony Parsons, back in his rock-and-roll journalism days.
Yes, that's The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, on the right.

I don't know if anyone else will agree with this, but this book reminded me a little bit of J. K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series. The connection first came to mind because these are two novelists who are new to crime fiction, but it's more than that.

Both writers have developed very human protagonists who are out of the usual run of hard-drinking own-worst-enemy types. Both authors' crime fiction is character-driven, with a great sense of place, and incorporate commentary about modern society. I think most people who enjoyed Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm will be likely to enjoy the grittier The Murder Bag––assuming they can get through that prologue.

I'm thrilled to hear that Parsons plans two more books featuring Max Wolfe. I can guarantee they'll be on my pre-order list.

Notes: I listened to the audiobook of The Murder Bag, read by Colin Mace, who raised the level of the book even higher. After the short prologue, the book is told in first person by Max, and Colin Mace embodied that character perfectly.

Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Are you looking for a little palate cleanser between your usual reading courses of murder and mayhem? I found a tasty tidbit that was published on October 1 by Simon & Schuster. It's Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, and you may remember I mentioned looking forward to it in my Fall Preview post here.

Professor Don Tillman is an assistant professor of genetics at an Australian university. Don also has every single minute of his life organized for maximum efficiency, including having a set menu for every night of the week (aka the Standardized Meal System). All calories, all minutes, all units of any kind are counted, and any forced deviations require a complete recalculation of everything that follows.

I know what you're thinking: this guy has Asperger's. Simsion definitely implies that, especially in his hilarious Chapter 2. Don has been roped into giving a talk on autism when one of his colleagues has to cancel, and Don prepares to give a lofty, academic-level speech called "Genetic Precursors to Autism Spectrum Disorders." He's not in the least deterred that his audience is a group of children with Asperger's, and their parents. Julie, the poor woman who is the facilitator, valiantly tries to steer Don to a more layperson-friendly approach. Don resists.

In response to a comment from Julie, Don tells the audience that autism is not a fault, but simply a
variant, and arguably a positive one, since it is associated with "organization, focus, innovative thinking, and rational detachment." When the question arises whether "rational detachment" means "lack of emotion," Don decides that if Julie wants a more layperson-friendly approach, he will use an illustrative example to answer the question. He posits a situation in which a people are hiding in a basement, being hunted by enemies. Everyone must keep completely quiet, but a baby is crying. Don then adds, "You have a gun––with a silencer." Pandemonium erupts in the lecture room but, on the plus side, the kids are totally into the story and have many suggestions for next steps, which you can just imagine.

So you can see why Don can be a trial to people. While he doesn't realize exactly why he puts people off, he knows he has issues. Still, he'd like to have more friends beyond fellow professor Gene and Gene's wife Claudia, and he'd especially like to have a wife. Now that's a challenge, he recognizes, since he's never had a second date. On one of his recent first dates, they go for ice cream and she wants apricot.  When the shop doesn't have that flavor, she decides to pass. Don, after ordering his double cone of chocolate chili and licorice (whoa), tells her she should order mango, since all ice cream, especially fruit flavors, taste basically the same because ice cream chills the taste buds. She disagrees, but Don insists on conducting an experiment to see if she can identify different flavors in a blind taste test. By the time he's purchased the test cones, his date has left the building.

Don decides that the most efficient approach is to design a 16-page questionnaire, which he posts on a dating website. The questionnaire includes items designed to reveal whether the target is habitually tardy (which would rule her out, of course), a non-meat eater (ditto), and many more. Amazingly, many women choose to respond to the questionnaire. Not so amazingly, nobody comes close to the perfect score Don expects.

When Don meets Gene's acquaintance, Rosie the bartender, she asks him to help her find out who her father is. Her mother died when she was 10, but told her that her father was one of her medical school classmates who attended a graduation party. So now Don has the Rosie Project, in addition to the Wife Project, which involves the walking uncontrollable variable that is Rosie.

Knowing Rosie requires nonstop adjustments of Don's schedule, Standardized Meal System and liquor/food allowances. That will happen when you get into bar fights, need to become an expert mixologist, fly to New York, steal guys' DNA, have to climb out a fourth-floor bathroom window, and so on. It's also a huge mental adjustment for Don, Mr. Literal, to deal with Rosie, Ms. Sarcasm. But we cheer for him to adjust, because underneath it all, he's a sweetheart––and he's all in favor of personal improvement and learning new things.

The Rosie Project is a delightful romp of a first novel. It was originally conceived of as a screenplay, and I'll bet it'll become one soon. Congratulations to former IT consultant Graeme Simsion, and I hope he keeps on writing.

Note: I received a free review copy of The Rosie Project.