Favourite Author, Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson's 16th novel in the Inspector Banks series, PIECE OF MY HEART, is one of the nominations for the 2008 Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year Award, which will be presented at the Harrogate festival, at which Peter will be present.

Fantastic Fiction has a list of all 18 titles published over the last 21 years. I haven't read them all by any means. FRIEND OF THE DEVIL (2007) is ensconced on Mt. TBR, and the 18th ALL THE COLOURS OF DARKNESS is due out later this year.

Most people don't realise that Peter Robinson is in fact Canadian - his books come over, not just in setting but also in style, as British police procedurals.

If you want to look at Peter's own website, you have a choice of two, both called, confusingly, "Peter Robinson's Official Website". The Inspector Banks site is really a blog and has an RSS feed. There is a list of Peter's public appearances. It also told me that Peter won the Crimespree award for 2007 the best on-going series. The other site is a splashier one, divided in two: a US site and a Canadian one, contains comprehensive information on his last 7 novels, and interviews which reveal more about him.

Anyway my own little database contains mini-reviews of 4 of his novels that I have read in the last 40 months. You'll see that all have rated very highly.

PAST REASON HATED (1991) My rating: 4.7
Susan Gay, newly appointed Detective Constable at Eastvale, her second day on the job in D.I. Bank's team, is called to a murder scene. It is 22 December, Christmas is approaching, and the rest of the team are at D.S. Hatchley's wedding celebrations. The victim Caroline Hartley lies stretched out on the lounge in front of the fire, with multiple stab wounds in her throat and chest, and blood drenching her whole body. She is part of the cast of a local dramatic production of Twelfth Night, and right from the beginning it seems as if there are far too many suspects.

INNOCENT GRAVES (1997) My rating: 4.6
The worst that can possibly happen...has.
A beautiful child is dead -- defiled and murdered in a lonely graveyard on a fog-shrouded evening. It is the sort of horrific crime Chief Inspector Alan Banks fled the city to escape. But the slaying of a bright and lovely teenager from a wealthy, respected family is not the end of a nightmare. Lies, dark secrets, unholy accusations, and hints of sexual depravity swirl around this abomination like leaves in an autumn wind, leading to a shattering travesty of justice that will brutally divide a devastated community with suspicion and hatred. But Banks must remain vigilant in his hunt -- because when the devil is left free to pursue his terrible calling, more blood will surely flow.

STRANGE AFFAIR (2005) My rating: 5.0
On a warm summer night, an attractive woman hurtles north in a blue Peugeot with a hastily scrawled address in her pocket, while, back in London, a desperate man leaves an urgent late-night phone message on his brother's answering machine. By sunrise the next morning, the woman is found inside her car along an otherwise peaceful country lane, shot, execution-style, through the head.
Welcome to the idyllic Yorkshire Dales, where Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot arrives on the scene and discovers, to her surprise, a slip of paper in the dead woman's pocket that bears the name of her colleague and erstwhile lover, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. Banks, meanwhile -- already haunted and withdrawn after nearly dying in the fire that destroyed his home -- has gone missing just when he's needed most, and has left plenty of questions behind.

PIECE OF MY HEART (2006) My rating: 4.7
An interesting structure this one: two investigations in one. In 1969 as organisers cleaned up after Yorkshire's biggest rock festival they discovered that an abandoned sleeping bag contains the body of a young woman who has been murdered. The victim has links to one of the bands, the Mad Hatters, that performed at the festival. And now in the present, Detective Inspector Banks is involved in investigating the murder of a journalist writing an article on the Mad Hatters. The novel pursues the two investigations and gradually they begin to converge..

THE DELICATE STORM, Giles Blunt

Unusually warm weather in northern Canada just after New Year brings with it a dense fog that shrouds Algonquin Bay. The discovery of a human arm out in the forest sparks a search for other body parts, and eventually bits that appear to have been mauled by bears are discovered. John Cardinal and Lise Delorme become involved in investigating this and another case where a local holds up a bank, threatening the teller with a gun. The identity of the hold up man is easily solved, but the identification of the body bits leads Cardinal and Delorme into learning about separationist activities from the early 1970s when a hostage was killed, two separationists confessed to his murder, and one of the hostage takers vanished. Another strand is introduced when a young female doctor disappears.

THE DELICATE STORM received the 2004 Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, as well as being nominated for a swag of others including the Dashiell Hammett, the Macavity, and the Anthony.

So why didn't I enjoy it as much as I expected to?

For one thing, I think it moved from being murder mystery to crime thriller. A very large number of characters crowded its pages. There was a lot of background information, heavy use of acronyms where the meaning didn't readily stay with me, and some slow passages. These were mainly caused by descriptive bits that became pages of detail that the reader needed for some later event or piece of information to be significant. It meant that the book really was rather long, and there was always a danger you might miss something important. Sometimes you had to wonder whether crowding the reader's head with the detail was worth it for the one significant item.

However there were a number of issues raised which would have appealed particularly to Canadian readers: Canadian politics, separationist movements, male and female detectives working together, Canadian severe weather and its effect on daily life (including police investigations), dishonesty in police officers, tension between intelligence and investigation agencies both in Canada, and between Canada and the USA. But for me, the ending was unsatisfactory, but I won't tell you about that, because you will want to read it for yourself.

THE DELICATE STORM (and what is the significance of that title?) is the second in Blunt's Cardinal series. The first was FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW, and after THE DELICATE STORM comes BLACK FLY SEASON and THE FIELDS OF GRIEF (aka BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS)

My rating 4.3