The Mermaids Singing
Sep. 24th, 2008 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloVal McDermid is pretty good. They're televising one of her novels and I enjoyed the first episode so much I turned right round and read The Mermaids Singing- the first of theTony Hill novels.
I like my detectives emotionally disengaged- and Hill- with his erectile disfunction and his phone sex- certainly ticks that box .
The setting is the fictional city of Bradfield- but if it has districts just like Manchester's and a gay village that's the second biggest in the country and is within half an hour's drive of the Yorkshire Dales then it is Manchester. I wish writers wouldn't do this. I like my novels to be set in real, visitable places. If it's good enough for Balzac- who had no qualms about gifting real French towns with entirely fictitious mayors and bishops- then it's good enough for everyone else!
Did I guess the ending? No. Did I find the ending convincing? Pretty much- within the conventions of the genre. So, tick, tick.
I'm not into torture porn. Neither, I think, is McDermid. She does her best, but her descriptions of perfectly frightful things being done to the living human body have a perfunctory air. I guess she's read Silence of the Lambs- and thinks that's what the punters want. Well maybe. Only not this punter.
Will I read more? Probably. But I'm not in a tearing hurry. I emerge from a book like this (bestselling, page-turning, reasonably well-written, not entirely untrue) with a faint, greyish consciousness of having been strong-armed into wasting my time.
And if you waste your time, what does time do back to you? Precisely.
I like my detectives emotionally disengaged- and Hill- with his erectile disfunction and his phone sex- certainly ticks that box .
The setting is the fictional city of Bradfield- but if it has districts just like Manchester's and a gay village that's the second biggest in the country and is within half an hour's drive of the Yorkshire Dales then it is Manchester. I wish writers wouldn't do this. I like my novels to be set in real, visitable places. If it's good enough for Balzac- who had no qualms about gifting real French towns with entirely fictitious mayors and bishops- then it's good enough for everyone else!
Did I guess the ending? No. Did I find the ending convincing? Pretty much- within the conventions of the genre. So, tick, tick.
I'm not into torture porn. Neither, I think, is McDermid. She does her best, but her descriptions of perfectly frightful things being done to the living human body have a perfunctory air. I guess she's read Silence of the Lambs- and thinks that's what the punters want. Well maybe. Only not this punter.
Will I read more? Probably. But I'm not in a tearing hurry. I emerge from a book like this (bestselling, page-turning, reasonably well-written, not entirely untrue) with a faint, greyish consciousness of having been strong-armed into wasting my time.
And if you waste your time, what does time do back to you? Precisely.
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Date: 2008-09-24 10:09 am (UTC)As for why the Tony Hill books are set in Not-Manchester, what the author says is that when she started writing them she was living in Manchester, James Anderton was Cheif Constable, and she didn't feel like pushing her luck.
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Date: 2008-09-24 01:02 pm (UTC)I understand her not wanting to get on the wrong side of the appalling Anderton- though if that's the case I rather wonder why she introduced a caricature of him into this novel.
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Date: 2008-09-24 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 01:03 pm (UTC)I prefer my corpses to turn up in the library with a neat bullet wound to the temple.
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Date: 2008-09-24 10:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 11:30 am (UTC)I like Val McDermid's books about the female boxer.
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Date: 2008-09-24 01:08 pm (UTC)