The Norfolk
Mystery by Ian Sansom
After a short delay (and over 20 books read in the
interim), I’m back! Safe to say, I’ve got lots of catching up to do, mainly because
I was lucky enough to be involved in helping to judge the Guardian First Book
Award, which involved reading 11 (sometimes scarily chunky) books over 8 weeks,
but there’ll be a whole series of posts about that and my thoughts within the
next couple of weeks.
For now, I’m drawing on my other book club. Having
previously near exclusively literary and romance-y fiction, we recently took a bit
of a detour and settled on some (affectionately termed) ‘cosy crime’ in the
form of Ian Sansom’s The Norfolk Mystery.
I’ve always been a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and it’d been
highly recommended by several of my colleagues as falling somewhere in the
middle of the two, so it was with high expectations that I set about reading
this book.
As is so often the case with high expectations, The Norfolk Mystery fell short of the
mark, and by quite a way.
PLEASE NOTE: COMPLETE SPOILERS FOLLOW.
The concept is good. The main character is Spanish Civil
War veteran Stephen Sefton, who struggles with his memories of the war and
finds himself down on his luck until a suitably mysterious job advert attracts
his attention. The job turns out to be working for the enigmatic Professor
Swanton Morley, famed for his prolific writing and efforts to extend reading
literature of all genres to the 1930s working classes. Morley has the idea of
creating guidebooks for each of the English counties, starting with (yep… you
guessed it…) Norfolk. It’s a decent idea, and Sansom has revealed that he plans
to continue the series to actually include a book for each of the historical English
counties. As with any crime book, along the way the pair stumble upon a
mystery, and ineffectual policing means that it’s down to them to work out the
answer.
That all sounds alright so far, right? So where does it
all go wrong?
I have two main issues. My first is with the characters.
Professor Morley, undoubtedly the most defined and prominent character (despite
the book being narrated by Sefton), is a pitiful caricature of Sherlock Holmes.
He’s socially awkward and clever, but it doesn’t pay off. Where Holmes is
interesting and mysterious, Morley is obscure and irritating. If Sansom was
trying to create a satire of Holmes, he’s done it perfectly, but the book takes
itself so seriously that it’s obvious it’s just poor characterisation. The key
difference that really makes Sherlock an interesting and likeable character,
but makes Morley a pretentious know-it-all was pointed out by one of my reading
group. Sherlock is intelligent, able to work out puzzles and piece together
seemingly unrelated events, whilst Morley is knowledgeable. He knows a lot,
using obscure Latin phrases (which Sansom irritatingly never bothers to
translate for the reader) and explaining in excruciating details almost
everything, but he doesn’t have the charm or intelligence of Holmes. Overall,
the character, obviously situated as the focal point of the novel, is just a
poor facsimile of Holmes.
In comparison, Sefton is overly boring. Despite the novel
coming entirely from his perspective, he has remarkably little character. One
of the wonders of first person narration is that you can really get into the
head of the character and allow the reader to see the world through the
particular gaze of that character, but Sansom wastes this opportunity. The vast
majority of the novel simply sees Sefton standing around as a suitable vehicle
from which to view the plot. He says very little to anyone besides Morley, more
often than not simply standing in a room whilst Morley and other characters
talk amongst themselves. Aside from a peculiar and entirely unnecessary frolic
in a graveyard, Sefton has no impact on the plot, offers no interest and stands
about like a lemon the entire way through. One of the most boring and undeveloped
narrators in any fiction.
In fairness to Sansom, Morley’s daughter, Miriam, is an
interesting and well put together character. Stupidly, Sansom includes her for
barely 10% of the novel before she disappears off, leaving the world’s most irritating
professor and the most ineffectual assistant to blunder about alone, dragging
the reader along kicking and screaming.
My second gripe is with the plot. A crime book,
especially one with ‘mystery’ in the title, usually includes a crime. Sansom,
on the other hand, decides to try and outsmart the rest of the genre and
neglect to include any sort of crime. The plot instead revolves around the
suicide of a vicar, and throughout the whole novel I was expecting it to be
revealed that there’d been some foul play, or that the vicar had really been
murdered, but no. In fact what we’re left with instead is the two infuriating
characters trying to piece together the reasons behind the suicide of the
vicar. It’s interesting, and the eventual answer is neat, if a bit simple, but
when there’s no crime, and no perpetrator, there’s no reason to invest. We never
meet the vicar, so we don’t care about him, and we’re not given a ‘baddie’ to
hate. It’s a limp plot, to say the very least.
As you can tell, I really wasn’t a fan. Upon first
reading it, I found it easy enough, and I managed to blitz the whole book in a
day. The writing style is decent, and it’s nothing strenuous, but it’s
forgettable, and utterly uninteresting. If you like cosy crime or want a nice
easy read, don’t be lulled in by this. Pick up that worn copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles or the
new Frances Brody and read that instead. You’ll enjoy it far more than this.
DON’T READ IT
WRITING: 5/10
PLOT: 3/10
CHARACTERS: 2/10
CONCLUSION: 5/10
OVERALL: 4/10
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