[I don't think I'm sending this twice, but just in
case--sorry, technical difficulty.]
Moving from least to most hardboiled:
Ruby, by Gerry Byrne. A London social
worker-turned-management consultant becomes an unwilling
detective, trying to find the missing stripper/perhaps
prostitute Ruby Tuesday. Almost all the women in the story
are lesbians; some are drag queens. The story on the whole is
rather unsatisfying. The killer is unmasked, but unpunished,
for very cynical and, I think, unrealistic reasons. But
others may disagree. I kind of liked the characters and there
were a few surprises along the way, but I can't say I really
liked the book. It was promising but failed. Some very facile
pop psychology incorporated. I can see a series in the
making. Not exactly hb, but not too cosy, either.
Val McDermid, Report for Murder. Report was her first novel,
and it's pretty easy going. A famous cellist that no one
likes is murdered at a Derbyshire girls' school. The amateur
detective is lesbian feminist socialist tabloid journalist
Lindsay Gordon. Her sidekick is her new love at first sight.
They're trying to find out who really did so they can get
their mutual friend, the prime suspect, off the hook. It
moves right along but about nine tenths is dialogue and for
some reason I started to get a bit tired of it. Lindsay lives
in Glasgow, so her other adventures are probably set
there.
Garnet Hill, by Denise Mina, is set in Glasgow. It's not a
police procedural or typical amateur detective story. A woman
wakes up one day to find her boyfriend murdered in her living
room. At first she's a suspect, but even after she isn't
anymore, she continues her own investigation into who killed
him and why. Her best friend is a tough, leather-wearing
motorcycle-riding counsellor in a battered women's shelter.
(In a restaurant, the waiter tells her she's sexy. She says
"Get us a fucking waitress." When the protag says she was
rude, she says, "Well I guess the important lesson for him to
learn is that I'm a fucking rude woman and he should stay out
of my way.") There is a theme of doctors' sexual exploitation
of patients, especially mental patients, and another theme of
the aftereffects of incestuous abuse. Not exactly a happy
ending, but there's a light in the distance. I'll definitely
look for her other books. I think this was her first.
Colloquial Glaswegian--keep Al's address handy.
Peter Turnbull's And Did Murder Him is a Glasgow police
procedural. A heroin addict who lives in a squat with a bunch
of other heroin addicts is found murdered in alley. It's a
pretty good plot. The action follows the three shifts of
detectives and their bosses over the days that it takes to
solve the crime. For once, I had a good idea whodunnit before
it was officially revealed, but that probably means I was
supposed to, because I'm usually lousy at figuring them
out.
Val McDermid, The Mermaids Singing, written 10 or more years
after Report for Murder is totally different, really
gruesome, in fact. There's no one hero, although it's more or
less a police procedural with the emphasis on Carol Jordan
(the name is too reminiscent of Lindsay Gordon), a competent
and ambitious and detective inspector. There's a serial
killer who leaves mutilated bodies of men in the gay cruising
area of Glasgow. The chapters alternate between the police
view of things and accounts written by the killer, describing
step by step the process of stalking, kidnapping and
torturing the victims. The homemade torture devices are based
on some from the Spanish Inquisition, updated with
electricity. Really horrible. Anyway, as far as plot goes,
it's pretty tense and hard to figure out, but I sort of wish
I hadn't read it because it's very disturbing. It won a
British crime writing award, possibly the Golden Dagger. You
have been warned.
Having just read three books by Scots all set in Glasgow,
I've been thinking about the dialect transcription problem.
These three authors were all very light on the "phonetic"
transcription. Occasionally a character would use an
expression like "dinnae" but for the most part, the spelling
was fairly standard (although in one book they say och and in
another auch). References were made to some people's accents,
but examples weren't given. For instance, in Report for
Murder, Lindsay Gordon doesn't sound Scottish to another
woman who also comes from Ayrshire, and it is mentioned that
occasionally she reverts to speaking with the accent she had
picked up at Oxford but dropped. But if you haven't a clue
what an Ayrshire accent sounds like, you won't find out here.
In And Did Murder Him, one of the characters is posh but the
others aren't, yet only the vocabulary gives it away, not the
pronunciation.
I like a few indicators of accent, although I know that it
can be condescending when done wrong. It's educational.
Someone mentioned Mark Twain: he actually explains in the
preface to Tom Sawyer, I believe, that not all his characters
sound the same because he has taken pains to represent about
14 different dialects (can't check the exact number right
now). That's a real feat, and valuable historically.
It's not true that only "lower class" people's accents are
marked: occasionally you'll come across someone who says
"gel" for "girl," for instance, although an author's
criterion for indicating a pronunciation as nonstandard is
probably "different from mine."
Karin
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