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In fact this collection contains every form of life alert. ‘Meet Me at the Crematorium’ would certainly deter me from experimenting with online dating. Janet from Eastbourne is sick and tired of Trevor, an embalmer. Although she doesn’t find the death business unattractive in itself, Trevor is too dull and predictable for her taste. Even their visits to the local S&M club are becoming wearily routine: if it’s Wednesday it must be nipple clamps.
So, in search of more dangerous pastures, she drives across Germany, ‘crazed with lust’, to meet Hans (‘I’m like a young Jack Nicholson’). The tension builds to a crypt-creaking finale. The author, Peter James, is another multi-award winner — thanks chiefly to his Brighton sleuth, Roy Grace. I found this slice of crime so haunting and disturbing I’ve listened to it three times. The reader is Eve Karpf.
Viewers of the popular television series Wire in the Blood will be familiar with Val McDermid’s dysfunctional psychologist, Tony Hill. In ‘Happy Holidays’ the brilliant but irrational doctor and his police collaborator, Carol Jordan, attempt to solve a series of macabre murders which only occur on feast days and public holidays. We know they’ll get there in the end, so the fascination lies chiefly in the way Jordan and Hill assemble all the pieces of this complex psycho-puzzle, and in how vividly McDermid paints her picture in barely 30 minutes. The narrator, the character actor Mike Grady — whose voice reminds me of John Le Carré’s — is one of the very best.
The most cinematic of the collection is Mark Billingham’s ‘The Walls’. The story is set in the USA — a continent away from his London-based Detective Inspector Tom Thorne. (Billingham’s Thorne series has recently been televised, with David Morrissey playing the hard-headed detective). Here we are in the non- descript bar of the Huntsville Palms Hotel and Chris, who tells us he is a construction supervisor, is sitting alone, watching a muted family gathering. He wonders what has brought them together, as his eye is drawn to a woman ‘with green eyes and dirty blonde hair’. Later the same evening they meet again at the bar, where this masterly tale begins to unfold.
Apart from being a first-rate crime writer, Billingham is also a successful stand-up comedian. The blend of tension and humour here works a treat, and I defy anyone to second-guess the denouement. Eric Meyers reads in classic Chandler mode, which adds to the electric atmosphere. It’s brilliant.
Christopher Fowler’s ‘The Deceivers’ is an ingenious voyage into the mind of a bored young man in a small Cornish town. The unnamed youth is talking into a tape-recorder at the local police station. With his mates Daniel and Tara, he has concocted a fake legend about their local landmark, Trethornton Hill. The trio’s plan to alleviate their tedium has gone hideously awry and Bored Youth is up to his neck in trouble unless a witness steps forward to vindicate him. Fowler, author of the Bryant and May mysteries, has produced another corker. The reader — with a real Cornish burr — is John Hasler.
We are constantly being reminded that our attention spans are getting shorter and that texting, twittering and blogging are all we now have time for. At the same time, books, films and even pop songs seem to be getting longer — so how refreshing it is to find the perfect length of story that should satisfy all enthusiasts of this genre.
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