Hot heads and a cool heart exposed in this bag of tricks

BRITISH journalist, broadcaster and novelist Tony Parsons has written the first of what looks like being a series of crime thrillers.

Tony Parsons The Murder Bag cover

BRITISH journalist, broadcaster and novelist Tony Parsons is famous for various things. For having written a book about fathers and sons, Man and Boy, which not only sold like hotcakes but reduced to tears the recently retired BBC inquisitor-in-chief Jeremy Paxman. For having been married to columnist extraordinaire Julie Burchill. And for being a columnist himself — first for the Daily Mirror, at present for The Sun.

Now he has written the first of what looks like being a series of crime thrillers and the immediate thing that strikes you is how much quicker on its feet, how dab and accomplished it is compared with JK Rowling’s new Cormoran Strike book The Silkworm. Why? Because Parsons has the ability to conjure a crime story with the economy, the effortless command of tempo and the exact registration of dialogue that we associate with the best television thrillers.

For quite a while with The Murder Bag, you feel finally you’re reading a crime novel that ­actually tallies with world’s best practice as exemplified by film and especially TV. Think of the Danes with The Bridge or The Killing, or Glenn Close and Rose Byrne in Damages.

It’s something the adult human mind craves, like a drug or a holiday, and there’s something in us that wants a story a bit more sophisticated than the wizard mistress’s windy soap set in an improbable literary world and starring a surly peg-legged hero.

The Murder Bag begins with rape, atrocity, boys. Then we’re plunged into a present and the lives of a group of chaps, each of whom attended a posh London school called Potter’s Field. That’s a nice touch: it’s the name of the place bought with the 30 pieces of silver Judas flung into the faces of the high priests after betraying Christ. These men start getting murdered.

They can be seen together, all in cadet uniform, in a school photograph from the 1980s. There’s the fat boy who’s now sportsmaster at the school, the Indian kid who’s a top lawyer, the obvious junkie who’s now homeless and the twins who went on to be an RAF officer posted to Afghanistan and a cool-as-ice politician. But the first to have his throat cut is a womanising businessman with a Russian wife. There’s also the shadow of another boy who committed suicide in Italy long ago but whose paintings seem to be scattered on the walls of the murderees and potential victims.

Someone crows about the crimes online. Is he the perpetrator or a damaged serial show-off? There’s a Margaret Thatcher-like senior policewoman and an attractive Scottish DCI, all granite Highland vowels and quiet intelligence. And centrally we have the hero-detective, Max Wolf, and his little daughter Scout, whom he looks after in the absence of her mother.

It’s intriguing stuff and it’s done with economy and style, and a soothing suavity. Parsons can handle something that sounds like how a poised Englishman might quote a Siegfried Sassoon poem or speak at a funeral. The voices and faces of the various cops and public schoolboys and strong walk-on characters are all utterly ­believable.

So what gradually made me less enchanted and made me feel warmer again about Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) and her latest thriller? I didn’t like the gradual encroachment of violence as a value in itself with ever so slightly fascist insinuations: the hero talking with relish about punching someone in the heart; the female police officer banging a suspect’s head up and down on the floor. De Sade was right when he said it’s the cruelty of authority that’s the unspeakable thing.

None of this would matter if what we were dealing with was art because art by necessity has a moral perspective on its constituent elements. But it matters with anything that aspires to be upper-level popular fiction, which proclaims its opinionated baggage like a badge of honour or infamy. That’s why the dodgy Jews in Agatha Christie’s 1930s detective stories are an ongoing embarrassment and why an artist of the popular such as Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell would not be caught dead with the equivalent to Parsons’s macho vigilante vision.

It’s also a bit of a weakness that his plot doesn’t have a thick enough texture of incident and complication to make his solution both surprising and reasonable in the traditional clue-laden fashion. None of which is to deny that Parsons has a lean and hungry style and much of his machinery — especially its tight writerly quality — is impressive, but he doesn’t have the heart of Rowling with her hobbled hero. Nor — for all his technique — does he have the art of the Peter Temples and Rendells.

Peter Craven was founding editor of Quarterly Essay.

The Murder Bag

By Tony Parsons

Century, 384pp, $29.99