New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Collins Crime 2000 Jan-March

File Updated: 17/12/2006

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Collins Crime JAN-MARCH 2000

Agatha Christie Five Little Pigs Published February 2000 by Collins Crime at Ł15.99 ISBN: 0002312832
See Review by Martin Edwards - author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries

Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, yet there were five other suspects; the stockbroker who went to market; the amateur herbalist who stayed at home; the three-time divorcee who had roast beef and the devoted governess who had none.

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Reginald Hill Arms and the Women Published February 2000 by Collins Crime at Ł16.99 ISBN: 0002258455 Artwork by: Jacket photograph: Š Simon Marsden
See Review by Andrew Taylor - author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series

When Ellie Pascoe finds herself under threat, the men in her life assume it's because she's married to a cop.
But while they trawl after shoals of red herrings, Ellie is blasted off course with a motley crew of women on a voyage of discovery whose perils make Scylla and Charybdis look like a pair of Barbie dolls.
Irish arms, Colombian drugs, and men who will stop at nothing, create a tidal wave which threatens to sweep her away. She heads out of town in search of haven, but instead finds herself at the very eye of the storm in a remote clifftop house undermined by the sea.
Fat Andy eventually smells a Security Service rat and comes steaming to the rescue, but for once it's too little, too late. Ellie's on her own (apart from her Middle England friend, Daphne; an octogenarian aid-worker and her vapid secretary; a gorgeous South American money launderer; an ancient crone; and a female cop who gets up her nose) and must reach deep down into her reserves to find the strength to survive.
After the huge success of On Beulah Heights, the question was, where could Reginald Hill take his Dalziel and Pascoe novels next! The answer is, even further! Arms and the Women is wholly Hill: pacey, perceptive, humorous, intelligent, and above all compulsively readable.

Reginald Hill is a native of Cumbria and a former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his outstanding crime novels featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, 'the best detective duo on the scene bar none' (Daily Telegraph). His writing career began with the publication of Clubbable Woman(1970), which introduced Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DS Peter Pascoe. Their subsequent appearances (Arms and the Women is the seventeenth in the series), together with the adventures of Luton lathe operator turned PI Joe Sixsmith, have confirmed Hill's 'strong claim as our finest living male crime writer' (Sunday Telegraph) and won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for his lifetime contribution to the genre.
The Dalziel and Pascoe novels have now been adapted into a successful BBC television series.

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Phil Lovesey Ploughing Potter's Field Pbk published February 2000 by Collins Crime at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0006512852

An exciting young talent on the British crime scene, Phil Lovesey's new novel is a dark and disturbing exploration of a killer's twisted psyche.
The tabloids called him' the Beast of East 16'.The authorities called him a dangerous sociopath. But one man called Frank Rattigan the only possible road to redemption.
When Adrian Rawlings undertakes a series of interviews with an incarcerated killer, he cannot possibly realize that his encounters with the man who tortured then dismembered a young air hostess 'for fun' in East London will eat so deeply into his own psychological neuroses.
As Rawlings struggles to find the vital threads to rationalize the horrifying crime, he finds himself drawn into a dark world of secret histories and hidden agendas which stretch far beyond the Beast himself. And he faces the possibility that the answers he strives towards lie buried in his own childhood - a place where the vulnerable are always at risk...

Phil Lovesey is the son of award-winning crime writer Peter Lovesey. Born in Essex in 1963, he was educated at Tiffin Boys School before taking a foundation course in art, leading to a degree in film and television studies, and a career as London's laziest copywriter at a succession of the capital's most desperate advertising agencies. He turned to 'proper' writing in 1994 with a series of short stories, and was runner-up in the prestigious MWA 50th Anniversary short-story competition in 1995.
He lives in Chelmsford with his wife and three young children. Ploughing Potter's Field is his second novel, his first, Death Duties, having been published to great acclaim in 1998.

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Andrew Taylor The Office of the Dead Published January 2000 by Collins Crime at Ł16.99 ISBN: 0002325594

The Roth Trilogy

'Taylor is marvellous and devilishly clever' Frances Hegarty, Mail on Sunday
The Office of the Dead is a chilling novel of crime and retribution, and is the third volume of Andrew Taylor' s stunning and acclaimed Roth Trilogy. The structure of the trilogy is technically unique in that the story moves back in time, beginning in the present and ending in the 1950s.
Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of crime novels, including the Dougal series, the Lydmouth books and The Barred Window. Caroline Minuscule won the John Creasey Memorial Award from the Crime Writers' Association and an Edgar Scroll from the Mystery writers of America. Our Fathers' Lies was shortlisted for the CWS's Gold Dagger, and the teenage thriller Snapshot was shortlisted for the NatWest Children's Book of the Year Award. Andrew and his wife live with their children in the Forest of Dean. The first two books in The Roth Trilogy, The Four Last Things and The Judgement of Strangers, are now out in paperback.

The Roth Trilogy

I started to think about the Roth Trilogy more than six years ago. The process began with a phrase: the Four Last Things: I wanted to use it as a title before I even knew what it meant. Then I discovered that in theology the Four Last Things are Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. I'd stumbled on the perfect foundation for a crime novel.
Another starting point was the idea that crimes don't just happen: they have a secret history; they are usually the consequences of a series of events that stretch far into the past, perhaps over generations. The West case was a particular influence: the murders took place near where I live; people we knew had had their lives touched by Fred West and his victims. ("Such a nice man. He'd do anything for you.")
Crimes involving children and young people as their victims are more terrible than most. I wanted to try to make sense of a series of these by digging out their causes. To do this, I knew I would need to write several novels. From the start I had in my mind the image of an archaeological dig: each novel strips away another layer of the truth.
In the trilogy, I wanted to look at this secret history from different angles and at different times. Laurence Durrell's Alexandra Quartet and Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy show characters and events from a variety of perspectives. I wondered if it would be possible to use a similar technique in crime fiction.
I think the structure of the trilogy is technically unique, certainly in crime fiction. It goes backwards in time. In this it mirrors real-life criminal investigations, which move from effects to causes.
Each book had to be self-contained and also work as part of the whole. This is not just a matter of having an integrated storyline involving recurring characters and themes. For the idea to work, each book had to modify the other two. I hope this will eventually make the trilogy as a whole something more than the sum of its parts.
Each of the novels uses the conventions of a different type of crime fiction - the first is a psychological thriller, the second toys with the format of the traditional whodunit, the third concentrates on a woman in peril (the "Had I but known..." sub-genre), though the perils are not of the conventional kind.
Among other things, this flexible format gave me a chance to explore the way that viewpoint influences interpretation. Moreover, some characters see the world through religious spectacles and others through secular ones: they see the same things but they attach different labels to them. One purpose of religion is to formalise how we think of good and evil, and to set them in a supernatural framework to help us cope with them. (Rather like crime fiction does, on another level). What counts is not what you see so much as the way that you see it.
The first novel, The Four Last Things, is set in the present, mainly in a seedy area of north-west London where I used to live. It's a Gothic whydunnit, rather than a whodunit, which concerns the kidnapping of four-year-old Lucy Appleyard. The story is told from two viewpoints - that of the child's mother, who's training to be an Anglican priest; and that of Eddie, the male sidekick of a beautiful child minder called Angel. Our culture tends to assume that physical beauty has a moral equivalence. Angel, on the other hand, is one of those nannies from hell. She has reasons of her own why she likes to steal children, why she likes to do certain things with them, and why Lucy, of all the children in the world, is special.
The Judgement of Strangers takes the story back to 1970, to a remote London suburb. It is narrated in the first person (which meant I spent much of 1997 in the mind of a sex-starved vicar in the threes of a mid-life crisis).
The Americans have a word for the traditional whodunit: they call it a "cosy", which has been defined as "a crime novel with a cat in it". I felt this was a challenge. The book uses many of the conventions of the cosy, including the cat. It's set in the "village" of Roth. The main characters are the family at the vicarage and the people at the big house. There's a Tudor teashop, a church fete with a fortune teller, and lots of clues. There's also a churchwarden who fancies herself as an amateur sleuth in the Grand Tradition of Mayhem Parva.
But Miss Oliphant isn't really Miss Marple - and Roth isn't a village any longer. Since the turn of the century, Roth has become a dormitory suburb for London, crammed with Cortinas and pebble-dashed houses. In the 1930s half of the parish was turned into a reservoir, drowned beneath 7 billion gallons of water.
The cat is called Lord Peter and its headless corpse is eventually found hanging in the church porch. So I suppose it forms part of new sub-sub-genre: the Cosy Noir. .
The third book, The Office of the Dead, is set mainly in 1958. Most of the action takes place in the outwardly sedate environs of a cathedral close. It's the first novel I've written entirely from a woman's viewpoint, and in the first person.
My narrator's name is Wendy. She's an atheist with a taste for gins and tonic. She's on the run from a broken marriage and a ruined life, and she comes to stay with her old friend Janet. Rather annoyingly, Janet has the perfect marriage, to a dashing clergyman, and the perfect child, a beautiful little girl called Rosie. The novel starts with Rosie, the little girl, saying that her name is Nobody. And when Wendy asks why, Rosie explains that her name is Nobody, because Nobody's perfect. Which turned out, rather to my surprise, to be the theme of the book, and perhaps the trilogy as a whole.
This book (like the earlier ones) has been full of other surprises for me. For example, when I was planning it, I reread The Judgement of Strangers. In that book I had invented a slim volume of Victorian verse by a minor poet. It was called the Tongues of Angels. The title was mentioned four times in the text. To my horror I found that on two occasions it was referred to as The Voice of Angels, not The Toungues. I hadn't noticed the mistake - nor my wife - nor the editors - nor the proof readers - nor the reviewers. In fact this gave me a major subplot for The Office of the Dead: the Victorian poet became much more important than I had planned. There are now two slim volumes - one Tongues, the other Voices. Almost identical in contents, but not quite.
For me at least, the Roth Trilogy_has been worth the long haul of writing it. It has shown me that crime novels can at least try to deal with serious themes and use innovative literary techniques.
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