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Let's not open the can of worms about some books transcending boundaries, but Robert Edric seems to be operating in that grey area between crime fiction and the literary novel. And according to his biography in the front of SWAN SONG, he's won a raft of awards, or been shortlisted for heavens knows what, for his non-genre fiction (mind you, the only thing not long-listed for the Booker Prize is my shopping list). SWAN SONG is the third book to feature Hull PI Leo Rivers. What do I know about Hull? Um, used to be a key fishing port, poet Philip Larkin worked in the university library, the city has its own telephone company, and there's a rugby league club called Hull Kingston Rovers. And you might want to guess which of these occupies a significant part of the book's plot. Sadly it's not the latter. In fact, by far the most interesting part of a rather bemusing book is the role the city and the decline of the fishing trade play in it. Edric does a cracking job in conveying the atmosphere of the place and the despair of people living on the breadline and harking back to a lifestyle long gone. Anyone who uses the crime novel to explore what's happening in society deserves attention. What he's less good at, though, is pacing and characterisation. Some readers will no doubt consider SWAN SONG to be elegiac and polished. The rest of us will likely describe it as plodding and mannered. I never took to Amanda Cross's Kate Fansler series, mainly because the characters seemed to stand around being awfully urbane and civilised and occasionally solving a mystery. Leo and his journalist chums Yvonne and Sunny stand around holding stilted conversations and then solve a mystery . . . When Susan Hendry, the mother of a man suspected of being a serial killer, says to Leo: "Yvonne said you had a weakness for fridge-magnet philosophizing," it's hard not to nod vigourously. Edric has a tin ear when it comes to dialogue and at no time do any of his characters sound like real people. They come across as either trite or cardboard, or both. His characterisation isn't any better. Leo is so one-dimensional that he rocks in a breeze, and he might just as well have arrived from one of those planets that Doctor Who and his Tardis visit. There's no back story on him, or anything in the present to persuade the reader that this is a chap we'll ever get to know. Leo plods round chatting to -- or, more accurately, talking at -- people who may be able to help him as he tries to prove that drug addict Paul Hendry didn't kill a number of women, several of whom were prostitutes. Breathing down his neck is a new senior policeman determined to use the case as a stepping-stone to higher things. There are various irritants in the book which suggest Edric wasn't as assiduous as he might have been when it comes to research. In English law you can't libel the dead. And very few journalists, even working for a news agency, would take photos as well as writing stories. Multi-skilling hasn't got quite that far in the print media. Sure these are hardly world-shattering errors, but they simply add to the feeling that Edric spent too long cultivating his writing style and not enough time on the nuts and bolts of what constitutes good crime fiction. SWAN SONG isn't appalling, lest you go away with that feeling, but it's pretty unintelligible unless you have read the previous two books in the series. And it just made me think that writers like Edric should leave genre fiction to the experts.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, June 2006
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