Books
Denis’s menaces
by David Hill
Michael Wall, Ray Prebble, Edmund Bohan, Michael Laws (and others, to whom I apologise deeply) have eased our crime fiction up from Not Too Good, past Not Too Bad, to Sometimes Damn Good.
Put Denis Edwards on that list. His latest has all the energy, irreverence and imminent anarchy that his fans will recognise and revere.
It’s prefaced by a cast list of 26, and you’ll need to keep flicking back. A cop called Lashing; a crim called Gravity; a pathologist called Dr Phillip St John Mortimer Price: Edwards likes his little jokes.
Chapter 1 begins with decapitation and disembowelment in Sydney, 1972. Chapter 3 opens with cats eating their dead owner, 1947. Events bound between the two decades. A 17-year-old is found garrotted on Mt Victoria. A quarter-century on, a solicitor knows she’s next on a list of bomb victims. (She spots the two wires poking from the parcel. Being a solicitor, she instantly looks up books on bombs.) Big arrows point back to the 1947 death.
So far, so spirited. But Edwards has a period point to plug, and this is where things start to creak. He’s done his stuff with the research: cars, shoes, local architecture, floor coverings all sound right. I have no trouble believing his account of how Catholic/Freemason factions split the police in the 1940s. As social history, that’s interesting enough. As possible motivation in a thriller, it labours.
Yes, I do understand that this book may be Miramar’s answer to The Da Vinci Code. The excellent Wellington seaside suburb rules in this narrative, as it has in some of Edwards’s earlier work. He likes its “world-class views in every direction and big strong houses”. He likes its ethnic, culinary and homicidal range.
He also likes one-word, two-word, three-word sentences, and one-line paragraphs. There’s snappy, snippy dialogue. There are no-brain sentences: “The emptiness of loss was still too raw”; “His eyes shrieked questions”. (The eyes have it in Miramar Morning: “cold blue eyes … quiet and dull eyes … lancing eyes … eyes lit like fires”.) There are excellent sentences, and paragraphs, and pages.
Real events lie behind the story – the disappearance of a Wellington girl in the 1960s; an unsolved office death from a letter bomb; a gay man kicked to death in Courtenay Place. Edwards crams them energetically into his plot.
He crams in a lot of unattractive humans, too. It’s a dog-eat-dog and dog-eat-vomit world. Pretty well everyone is a loser. Pretty well everyone is predator or prey. Police officers sneer at their juniors; a senior solicitor is a foul-breathed old lecher; the coroner is “yoked to the burden of fornication”; the Bishop once punched out a rival rugby forward’s lights.
It certainly keeps things vivid. But must even the one-paragraph cameos have rheumy eyes (yes, more eyes) and too-tight underpants? Characters swell into caricatures. Potential victim Helen holds interest and some sympathy, but the narrative needs the steadiness that would come from someone more … well, more ordinary.
There is a good story in here. Indeed, there are about four good stories in here. They stride along on a variety of compass bearings and combine in a flat-out gallop towards an ending that manages a blow-up near the Miramar bus terminal, a string-up in Mt Eden, and a use for an engine hoist that you should not try in your garage.
You thought a drama in Miramar meant a low 747 approach? Slough off your prejudices. How very different from the home life of our own dear suburbs.
MIRAMAR MORNING, by Denis Edwards (Penguin, $28).
