LJ Ross - Holy Island

A detective yarn set in Northumberland with a plethora of five-star reviews on Amazon. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it happens, but let us start with the basics. The 'locked room' mystery is one of the most satisfying subsets of the detective genre. Think of The Speckled Band or Murder on the Orient Express or more recently The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  All of these offerings give us a closed scenario where certain events take place with a limited number of protagonists.  So far, so good.  Ryan has identified the spectacular and windswept Holy Island (or Lindisfarne) as the setting.  A spiritual and unforgiving place, cut off from the rest of the world twice a day.

We have a troubled (naturally) policeman taking some time away from the job by living on the island. Almost instantly we have a gruesome murder and our man decides he is 'ready' to investigate it.  In the real world his boss would have refused point blank, but this is fiction so we can run with the idea that he was on the scene and is therefore best suited to seek out the killer.  Almost immediately we run into serious problems.  The detective is impossibly handsome and irresistible to women, which is not a clever idea in this type of fiction.  There is a reason that 'tecs are often drunks, socially inept or curiously sexless (see Poirot, H) and that is that they should be at the periphery rather than the centre of the narrative.

Joining our detective is a cast of characters straight from the books of cliches-r-us with no caricature left un-turned. Perhaps the most egregious of these are two sisters who are at the heart of the tale. One is a thoughtful academic time with elegant beauty, an academic at Durham University (Newcastle is nearer and larger, but we can let that pass) who has been called in to assist the police. Guess what? DCI Ryan initially dismisses her as being just a girl who will get in the way, but eventually starts to have the feelings for here. Well, I never. Then there is her sister - they haven't spoken for years, naturally, not even via Facebook or WhatsApp - who is a real piece of work. Filed clearly under 'S' for slapper, this non-character uses her blousy ways, excessive makeup and soucy lingerie (which she leaves out on the bed for all to see) to have her way with pretty much all the men on the island.

I can hear the alarm bells starting to sound in the heads of crime aficionados now.  Is this really a detective novel or something that would sit better on the slush pile at Messrs. Mills & Boon?  Sadly the latter is a more suitable home for this as it fails to pass muster in terms of being scary or thrilling.  In fact, I spent most of the time reading it spotting plot holes as big as those in the fishing nets that the local boats use.  If we forget about the wafer-thin and completely forgettable characters, then surely there must be something to like?

The masters of this genre are able to weave their narrative around a truly believable location whether it be real or fictional.  Take, for example, Margery Allingham whose Pontisbright and Mystery Mile are adapations of real places that fit the tale well.  Curiously, for a work of fiction, there has been no attempt to adapt Holy Island to fit to the story. This is a community of just around two hundred souls, in the middle of winter when the number of tourists would be negligible or non-existent.  DCI Ryan seems to believe - quite sweetly for a detective of a relatively senior rank - that the islanders will source their goods only from vendors on the island. This is not Pitcairn. Morrisons in Berwick is a terrifying twenty-three minutes drive away (according to that miracle of technology Google Maps) allowing access to just about anything required.

There are more jaw-dropping holes too, obviously Northumberland County Council are not only able to run a school on the island (pop. 200) but one that runs trips to the island's own museum during the Christmas holidays.   The museum is also, unlike any other tourist attraction at that time of year, open.  Let us turn to police procedure - the heart of any good detective tale.  As I have already mentioned, this island may be cut off from the sea, but it is far from remote.  The flooding of the causeway is more of an inconvenience than a problem as it is easy enough to reach the island by air or water in an emergency.

The idea, therefore that senior officers would allow Ryan to set up the investigation in his house is so laughable as to be more at home in a sitcom than in a supposedly serious piece of fiction.  Not only would any evidence taken in interviews there not have been usable in court, those questioned in such a manner could well have launched action against the officer involved.  If a suspect needed to be detained in custody when the island was not accessible by road, the only sensible (if costly) procedure would be to take them out by helicopter.  The nearest police station is likely to be Berwick, five or ten minutes away.

There is no need to keep picking away as there are sections of the book that work well. It tries, relatively successfully, to cram in a lot of 'stuff'.  There is a secret society, lots of things about old religious beliefs and some great descriptions of the island and its surrounds. This brings me to the crux of what I think is wrong with this book.  It reads to me like a work that has been released to the world half-formed.  Herein lies the problem with the phenomenon of self-publishing. Editors, publishers and proof-readers are no more a luxury than hiring a producer to make a coherent album.

Had someone read this version of the book and asked the author if they intended it to seem quite so sentimental and cloying in parts, there would have been a great opportunity to flesh out the characters. Challenges on some of the geographical, technical and legal aspects may well have led to a rewrite and a more robust result.

There are more of these books and they seem to be gaining in popularity.  Perhaps I will return to the series to see whether any of the later entries are more fulfilling.  It would not surprise me to see a television version of this in the not too distant future, the scenery and a smouldering male lead would be just the thing for drear winter nights.  What's the betting they fiddle with the plot and set it in the height of summer? To sum up, an opportunity missed in purely literary terms, but undoubtedly a popular creation.