February’s best new crime fiction: drag queens and murder masters

The punk revolution is still gobbing away as Joe Thomas’s White Riot (Quercus, £14.99) opens in London in 1978, but even as The Clash et al kick against the pricks, the pricks are kicking back. Set in Hackney, against a backdrop of immigration, activism and institutionalised racism, the novel begins with the death of Shahid Akhtar, whose drowning is designated death by misadventure by the police, even though it happens after closing time beside a pub with a strict “no Asians” policy.

The rise of the National Front and its toleration – or tacit approval – by the Metropolitan Police is one aspect of Thomas’s novel, which revolves around DC Patrick Noble, “a Hollywood-case-only sort of a geezer”. He is assigned to the Met Race Crime Initiative and inserts undercover cops into the National Front and a loose coalition of anti-Fascist groups.

Like David Peace and James Ellroy, Thomas fictionalises historical fact (among the many narrative voices here is that of Margaret Thatcher). He utilises true crimes – the death of Colin Roach in 1983, for example, who according to the police walked into Stoke Newington nick to take his own life – to explore the extent to which the authorities weren’t simply colluding with right-wing racists but creating the conditions in which racism could flourish.

Thomas’s style also echoes that of Ellroy and Peace, employing a truncated prose that emphasises the breathless urgency of the story’s time and place. Thomas has a lighter, more comic touch, however: determined to deliver truth to power even as he concedes that “no one gives a monkey’s”, DC Noble has a sense of twisted whimsy and gallows humour that leavens the grim litany of the era’s racist assaults and murders.

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The first part of a proposed United Kingdom Trilogy, White Riot is a timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre.

Death in Heels (Thomas & Mercer, £8.99), the debut novel from Irish author Kitty Murphy, is set in the fabulous world of Dublin’s drag scene. Fi McKinnery is delighted when her best friend, Mae B, takes to the stage at TRASH for the first time, only for her big moment to be upstaged by the jealous, self-absorbed Eve, who parodies Mae B’s performance. When Fi discovers Eve dead in the alleyway behind TRASH later that night, the police believe her death to be an accident. But what if they’re wrong? What if a sociopath is targeting Dublin’s drag queens? And what if Mae B is Eve’s killer?

Death in Heels offers a fresh take on the traditional murder mystery. The drag queens bitchily refer to Fi as “Hagatha Christie” when she starts investigating Eve’s death. The novel is at its strongest when Murphy is exploring identities in flux, especially the contrasts between the drag queens’ public personas and their private selves (some of the queens, of course, can’t help but be fabulous in or out of costume). A dramatic gear-change near the end delivers a rather improbable Hollywood ending, but otherwise Death in Heels is a charming first offering in the “Dublin Drag Mystery Series”.

Rupert Holmes’ Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide (Headline, £20) is a comic tale set in McMasters University (no apostrophe required, we’re told), an Ivy League finishing school for aspiring killers where “Cain is viewed as a patron saint”. Cliff Iverson, Gemma Lindley and the mysterious Dulcie Mown arrive at McMasters to receive tutelage in the dark arts of “deletion”, which involves education in all manner of homicide. What follows is a parody of the Golden Age of Detection, where a bewildering variety of exotic methods of murder are explored – although here the means and motives aren’t revealed by the investigating detective, but offered as a thesis by would-be murderers hopeful of graduating with the McMasters imprimatur.

A Tony Award-winner for his musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the songwriter who gave us Escape (The Piña Colada Song), Holmes has an unusual way of exploring the genre’s conventions. His sense of humour, however, is an acquired taste – it is no exaggeration to say there’s about three puns on every page, few of them worthy of the space. His inability to deliver a unique voice, or even tone, for each of his main characters means that it is difficult to care as their adventures grow absurdly convoluted.

“As much as Lucinda feared she was the wrong person to be in charge of investigating her sister’s disappearance, there was no one else.” So begins Nothing Can Hurt You Now (Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99) by Brazilian author Simone de Campos, translated by Rahul Bery. Based in Rio, Lucinda takes a call from Graziane, a friend of her younger sister Viviana, to say that Viviana, a model, has failed to arrive in São Paulo. With the police unwilling to help, Lucinda has no choice but to fly to São Paulo. There she uncovers what appears to be “a porno self-help book” in Viviana’s belongings but which she later realises is a diary.

The novel segues into an extended character study of Viviana, “a mixed-race woman who doesn’t bow her head in submission”, as de Campos explores Brazilian attitudes to race, class, prostitution and women. It’s a classic bait-and-switch: having lured us into the story with a conventional tale of a reluctant amateur sleuth, de Campos delivers a polemic against patriarchal privilege that somehow believes, despite perpetrating “crimes of kidnap, assault, false imprisonment, attempted femicide and some others”, that it is still entitled to justice.

[ Declan Hughes reviews January’s best new crime fiction ]

[ The best crime fiction of 2022, chosen by Declan Hughes and Declan Burke ]

Jane Harper’s debut The Dry (2016) introduced federal agent Aaron Falk, who specialises in investigating financial crimes. Exiles (Macmillan, £16.99) is the third of Harper’s five novels to feature Falk, and opens as he tries to remember the details of Kim Gillespie’s disappearance at the Marralee Valley Food and Wine Festival, which occurred while Falk was in Marralee visiting with his friends Greg and Rita Raco. One year on, with Falk back in Marralee to act as godfather to Greg and Rita’s new baby, the local police mark the anniversary of Kim’s disappearance with an appeal for information, reigniting Falk’s interest in the case.

A lesser writer might simply employ Falk’s outsider’s eye to see things that the locals have overlooked, or grown too familiar with to notice, but Exiles is a story rooted in many different kinds of relationships – those of lovers and married couples, and fathers and sons, and old friends and unexpected enemies – the exploration of which gradually teases out the truth of what happened to Kim Gillespie. Falk is, yet again, an understated, pragmatic and wholly believable guide as he weeds out decades of lies and half-truths from childhood friendships grown knotted and poisonous.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)