Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth

Normally, I’m not a fan of invented places in fiction. I much prefer the Stuart MacBride approach of setting novels in recognisable locations, rather than making them up (in MacBride’s case it helps that I lived in Aberdeen for three years so am very familiar with his locations. Cathi Unsworth’s Weirdo, however, has such an extraordinary sense of place it doesn’t matter that her Norfolk seaside town of Ernemouth is not a real place because Cathi describes it so vividly it comes to life.

What she also does in this novel is get inside the heads of troubled teenagers and see the world – big, unfriendly, aggressive – from their solipsistic point of view. It’s quite a feat, describing the fractured views of genuinely confused young people with such acuity that you believe, entirely, in them and their several crises. Make no mistake, Weirdo is an excellent book.

The drama alternates betwen 1984, when a young boy was horrifically – possibly satanically – murdered in an old pillbox on the Norfolk coastline, and 2003, when Sean Ward, a private detective is reinvestigating the case after new DNA evidence comes to light casting doubt on the verdict in the original court case. In that, Corinne Woodrow, a damaged 15-year-old girl, was alone convicted of the murder but this new evidence suggests there may have been someone else present when the crime was committed. We see the gradual unfurling of the original crime, the coming together of a group of disconnected and disaffected young people, their orbits colliding catastrophically until disaster becomes inevitable; and, simultaneously, we follow Sean as he and a friendly local journalist try to unpick those same events from across the divide of two decades of silence and cover-up. As with most of Cathi Unsworth’s novels, there is a large and rich cast of characters, and each possesses their own foibles and concerns. It quickly becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and that Corinne Woodrow may be an innocent wronged.

There is a crime here, and a mystery to be resolved (and very effectively it is, too), but in some regards Weirdo isn’t a crime novel. I’m not sure any of Cathi’s books are. She’s on record as saying: “It is not the investigators, but the victims of crime to whom I want to give the main voices in my novels.” And that is the key to her writing. This is not a solve-it-by-numbers kind of novel, where things happen because they have to in order to develop the plot. Cathi Unsworth creates believable characters and you can tell she cares about them and, in so doing, she makes us care about them. Corinne is a fragile soul, and there is an inevitability about the way she is damaged, over and again, by a cold and calculating universe.

Thus, we are taken deep into the world of these teenage misfits, much more densely than we would had the novel been written by someone else, because for Cathi it’s character that matters, not plot. Sure, the central action is shocking and you want to have the solution revealed, but the novel explores the danse macabre of these various young participants, seeing in each of them the failures and triumphs, fears, humiliations, anger and love, hope and despair that helped shape them as human beings, helped each one to play their part in the tragedy that unfolded. It’s beautifully done.

The Mobster's Lament by Ray Celestin

 

 

The Axeman’s Jazz, the first in Ray Celestin’s City Blues Quartet, won the CWA New Blood Dagger for best debut crime novel and it was a well deserved accolade. It was exciting, original, densely evocative of a fascinating time and place, suffused with the rhythms of rudimentary 1910s jazz when Louis Armstrong – a character in the book – took his first steps towards immortality. The second in the quartet, Dead Man’s Blues, picked up the same central characters a decade on, in 1920s Chicago, the era of Al Capone, the moment when, with the magnificent West End Blues, Satchmo changed jazz forever.

Now, the third in the series, The Mobster’s Lament, jumps forward to the 1940s in New York, when Charlie Bird Parker and Dizzy Gillespier were inventing bebop and jazz was preparing for its next, stunning metamorphosis.

The central pairing of Ida Davis, a private detective and a black woman who could pass for white – often, alas, a distinct advantage in those days – and Michael Talbot, a former New Orleans police chief, remain. They are older, of course, and Michael, in particular is not the man he was. Retired and his body ageing, he is no longer suited to the hectic, violent world still inhabited by Ida. Unfortunately, though, he is hurled back into it when his son is arrested and charged with four brutal – possibly voodoo-related – murders in a seedy flophouse. Michael knows he is innocent but the case against him seems watertight.

Curiously watertight.

He calls on Ida, his old friend and colleague, to assist, and they begin an investigation which takes them into the heart of 1940s gangsterdom, with passing visits to the jazz bars in which Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were beginning their experiments with the very structure of music.

A parallel plot features a Mafia fixer, Gabriel Leveson, who has a secret of his own – he has been salting away Mob money for years and has planned his imminent escape. Before he can put the plan into action, however, he too is drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse when he is ordered by a Mafia boss to track down a missing $1 million. Gradually, violently, the stories of Ida and Michael and Gabriel converge.

As always with Ray Celestin, there is a mindboggling amount of plot. You would do well to read this fast, as you will lose track of characters and events otherwise. And the other signature traits of Celestin are also present – the vivid historical detail, the periodic, very violent crime, the beautiful overlaying of the history of jazz, here told through Satchmo in his wilderness years and through the tyros setting the bebop clubs on fire.

It is perhaps fifty or sixty pages too long. There are some longeurs and repetitions and sometimes the detail becomes almost photographic, but this is a failing so many writers succumb to as their careers progress. Take virtually any writer and track the average page count from first novel to last and you see the same thing. Oh, for an editor who could take writers in hand and tell them to cut the verbiage.

But, for all that, this is a great read. Fast-paced, exciting, very well written and with characters who feel alive and vibrant, with all their failings and foibles, their strengths and their fears. Once you start, you’re unlikely to finish until the final page is turned.

The fourth and final novel is due to be set in Los Angeles in 1967. The sixties was the era when bebop was being overtaken by free jazz, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders et al. That’s my favourite jazz period and I can’t wait to read it.