Murder, mischief and misdirection: Four of the hottest new crime novels

CRIME
We Solve Murders
Richard Osman
Viking $34.99

Midnight and Blue
Ian Rankin
Orion, $34.99

The Valley
Chris Hammer
Allen and Unwin, $34.99

The Ledge
Christian White
Affirm Press, $34.99

Richard Osman is a very tall, very funny man, as his 2024 appearance at the Sydney Town Hall confirmed. He’s also gravitated from British quiz-show phenomenon to bestselling author with the first in his series of retirement village capers, The Thursday Murder Club, now being made into a film. The stellar cast includes Helen Mirren (who was once DI Jane Tennison) and Pierce Brosnan (who was once James Bond).

We Solve Murders is billed as the first in a new series starring retired policeman Steve Wheeler, who is the kind of laconic, mournful but still attractive ageing hero that Osman does so well. Steve’s sidekick is his no-nonsense daughter-in-law, Amy, who works as a private security guard.

We meet Amy first, hanging out poolside in South Carolina with her latest assignment, Rosie D’Antonio, who claims to be the world’s bestselling author, “if you don’t count Lee Child”. The smart-mouthed Rosie might be 60 or 80 – it’s difficult to tell, given the work she’s had done – but she’s been receiving death threats from a Russian oligarch after including him as a character in her most recent novel. Amy’s at the ready.

Steve, meanwhile, is patrolling his village in the New Forest, picking up litter, looking for lost dogs, watching the ponies, and recording the appearance of strange cars and cats on his dictaphone.

He’s still mourning his dead wife, and much prefers pub quizzes, his favourite armchair and the company of a cat called Trouble to the adrenaline rush of the old days. But that’s about to change.

How the fates of Rosie and Steve become entwined via Amy is the somewhat complicated scenario driving a plot that is much less interesting than the various droll encounters it enables.

Osman writes sparkling dialogue and there are lots of laugh-out-loud moments, but I stopped trying to follow what was going on about halfway through. I liked Steve, though.

I also like John Rebus, Ian Rankin’s gruff detective who may be experiencing something of a renaissance given the new, darker, junior version of himself that has recently appeared on SBS. While this latest TV series has been endorsed by Sir Ian himself, the Rebus of Midnight and Blue is now 70, battle-scarred and in prison, serving a life sentence for the attempted murder of his old crime-boss enemy, Big Ger Cafferty, who actually died of a coronary. An appeal is pending.

Rankin wastes no time setting the scene. Rebus is in the queue for breakfast when the prisoners are shepherded back to their cells. “Room service today,” a grumpy officer tells them. “Wish I was as lucky.” A prisoner has just been murdered in his cell, his bunk-mate injured and completely out of it, given the plentiful drugs that have found their way into His Majesty’s Prison Edinburgh. Rebus, naturally, is intrigued by this locked room mystery.

The murder, it emerges, is connected to the turf wars that are now ensuing on the outside given Cafferty’s recent demise. Would-be kingpin Darryl Christie, who just happens to be on the inside with Rebus, is now running the show from his cell, and seems happy to help given Rebus has done him the favour of eliminating Big Ger.

Predictably, Rebus is unfazed by all the shenanigans and spends most of his time in the library while effectively steering his old police comrades in the right direction as he begins to get a handle on just who is setting up whom and why. With its convincing portrayal of prison life, from the primary school meals to the smells of “testosterone and wariness” that fill whatever air there is, this is the most entertaining and rewarding Rebus outing for some years. Let’s hope his appeal is successful.

The geographically inspired Chris Hammer is also on a roll with his latest, The Valley. As in all of Hammer’s previous books, there’s precise attention paid to the ways people are shaped by the place in which they live. Once again, an evocative map by Aleksander Potocnik helps bring the fictional valley to life with its cricket ground, general store, and the abandoned Gryphon Mine atop the escarpment.

We’re in gold-mining country here, with ongoing characters Detective Senior Constable Nell Buchanan and Detective Sergeant Ivan Lucic, who have been summoned from Dubbo to investigate the suspicious death of local entrepreneur Wolfgang Burnside. As in Hammer’s earlier book, The Tilt, Nell takes centre-stage as the case becomes entwined with her family history. That’s the hook.

About 50 pages in, the narrative backflips to 1990 and the account of another police officer, Simmons Burnside, Wolfgang’s father, as he deals with a group of protesters trying to stop the clear-felling of the forest. This doesn’t turn out well.

And so the now familiar braided narrative structure proceeds, with the story of the crimes in the past alternating with the story of the investigation in the present. In the process, Hammer vividly captures the “Australianness” of it all, from the Bushranger Hotel “like a grande dame, elegant and entitled” with its “iron lace on the wraparound verandah a statement of gentility”, to the Gondawanda Falls with its “tree ferns and a towering canopy, spotted gums and staghorn’.”

The valley may be a fiction, but it is instantly recognisable, as is Christian White’s depiction of another cliffside rural setting.

After four standalone crime books, White has rightly been christened the Master of Misdirection. Being prepared for this, I almost got there, but divulging how and why would spoil the pleasure of pitting your wits against the strategy of a devious plotter. To be fair, there’s a lot more going on in The Ledge than narrative sleight of hand. The Ledge is also a story about friendship, “the hell of puberty”, and how boys become the men they are.

It begins in the present with the discovery of a severely decomposed body in the rural township of West Haven, before returning to the events in 1999 that explain how that body got there – another braided narrative.

Our main source for the backstory is the diary of one of the four young friends, Justin Smith, who has ambitions to be a writer. In preparation, he’s read Stephen King’s On Writing and he’s been reading a lot, “mostly horror or sci-fi but also some smarty-guy stuff like Salinger and Hemingway”. So much for literature, but you have to love Justin’s voice.

In his author’s note, White tells us that The Ledge is a love letter to two of the greatest books of all time, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Stephen King’s It, and that it draws from his own experience of being the “weird kid” in school. There’s also a nod to the 1986 film Stand By Me, as the kids follow the railway tracks to the eponymous ledge where the crime at the centre of this powerful novel occurs.

The Ledge is a story of innocence lost, and while clever it most certainly is, it’s also profoundly moving in its portrayal of fatherhood. Not to be taken lightly, this one.

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