The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths by Harry Bingham

 

 

I have written about the Fiona Griffiths series before and it is one of my favourite current crime series. The latest, the sixth book The Deepest Grave, is now out and for a brief period available for 99p on Kindle if you read that way. Whilst this title is not my favourite, as usual it still kept me gripped.

Bingham does tend to do dramatic if not overly-dramatic plots but not so much that you don't forgive him. In this run out for Fiona the twist is bigger still and I was not sure he was going to pull the whole thing off. I still wasn't sure he had done so when I got to the end, though it was certainly worth the ride. What is interesting is that Bingham seems very aware of this as there is a couple of additional pages of analysis of realism versus improbability in crime fiction at the end of the novel in which he makes some truly interesting points.

I've always thought that labelling crime fiction a realistic genre was rather fake. The more realistic plots just seem to chuck in a lot of creative violence to make things "gritty" but the violence and the body count and the peculiarities of the criminal (or the detective) always seem to me to be a fake kind of sign of realism and probably not something any real detective would recognise. Bingham makes the point that most crime writers are literary descendants of either Raymond Chandler or Conan Doyle and that even though Fiona carries a police ID she's more Hounds of the Baskervilles than the mean-streets-of-wherever, and therefore being a bit wacky (he describes his own plots as 'somewhat exotic') in the plot department is ok.

I'd go further still: I would argue that many of the so-called cosy crime novels have to work harder. Not only do they need to create a dramatic and new plot without reaching for levels of violence hitherto unseen, they also need to work harder with character, atmosphere and setting. I read more truly observed little nuggets about human nature in sons of the Baskervilles than in the more thriller style of writing. They are also not always that cosy - there are some truly vicious moments of character destruction in M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin stories and I think Alan Bradley nailed it when he puts a back door from the tea shop to the morgue in the Flavia de Luce series.

In a way writers like Bingham with the Fiona series and Martin Edwards with both his Harry Devlin and Hannah Scarlett series occupy something of a middle ground. The real world definitely exists in their work with drugs, sexual abuse, murder, corporate neglect and corruption, but the viewer is kept how realistically most of us are: slightly at one remove from the worst that life has to offer. The power of their work is in analysing what goes wrong in human nature or relationships for such things to happen. And when the brutal does happen is is not merely a plot device.

The grittier novels are not truly real either, for if they were they would be less idiosyncratic and more plainly, mundanely and excruciatingly distressing in such a way that we would not read them in anything like the numbers that we currently do. When the drama Three Girls was broadcast I lost count of the people on Twitter who said they had had to turn it off - what happened to the girls was not some predator's quirk, some signifier for a detective to latch on to; it was mundane, everyday, horrific abuse: hard to analyse, hard to stop, hard to prosecute. When horror is truly real and an everyday reality, we cannot watch. It is not entertainment, and the truths told therein are just too painful. 'Realism' in crime fiction cannot compete with this. Rather, all forms of crime fiction magnify the bizarre, whether it is the cosy world of Flavia de Luce who does her own forensics at 11 years old or diamonds shaped like the devil's pentagram beneath the eyelid of a corpse in a gritty Jo Nesbø novel (Bingham's example) - it is this bizarreness that keeps us psychologically safe.

So back to The Deepest Grave: as a follower of the series I would have liked to have seen some more of Fiona's personal story play out (she is researching something from her past over the course of several books) and a more criminally normal progression of her long running desire to nail the major crime ring that she has worked on or around in previous books. Here she makes some progress on the latter but rather obliquely.

On the plus side spending time with Fiona is always fun and her new best friend, another strong female character, is brilliantly drawn (Bingham writes about women so well). There are also lashings of Welsh myth and history in this one which is fascinating. Bingham also manages to chuck in an entertaining vicar who is neither a prig nor a hypocrite, and to give Fiona's gangster father a fuller run out than usual. The plot is bizarre but the sums, so to speak, do add up. All in all it is an highly entertaining read, and perhaps because it does not advance Fiona's overarching stories much, would be an easier first read in the series than some of the other volumes, and would be great holiday read so long as you're prepared for much myth and legend to collide with the police procedural!

Comments

[Harriet]

I've been longing to read this since you put me onto Fiona through an earlier review. I've gone straight to Amazon and got this for kindle 99p. Great review - thanks so much.

[Juxtabook]

You're welcome Harriet. The plot is loopy but it is still thoroughly enjoyable!