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"A wanton act of destruction" --- no, not a murder as such, but the way one of Elizabeth George's outraged readers described the unhappy ending of WITH NO ONE AS WITNESS, her second-to-last book: Helen, the adored pregnant wife of George's policeman hero, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, is gunned down on the doorstep of her London house. Mystery lovers are often habituated to tidy, let-justice-be-done denouements; sacrificing Lynley's nearest and dearest evidently violated some unspoken taboo.
When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes (he was weary of turning out stories about the eccentric detective), his admirers were so upset that he had to bring Holmes back from the dead. George, in contrast, doesn't seem inclined to appease her fans: Instead, she takes an even bigger chance in her new book, WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER, telling the story behind Mrs. Lynley's murder.
The apparent culprit is 12-year-old Joel Campbell, a mixed-race boy from North Kensington --- a neighborhood where the police are not heroes but enemies; where gangs rule, drugs and sexual violence are endemic, and there is a constant struggle to survive. Joel and his two siblings --- Vanessa, his older, troubled sister, and Toby, a boy who seems to live in his own private world --- are all but orphaned (their father is dead, their mother in a psychiatric hospital; they've been abandoned by their grandmother and fobbed off on an aunt). Caught between painful memories of a one-time happy childhood and the perils of their current existence, they lurch helplessly down the road to disaster. Lynley, by the way, does not even appear in the book, and his police sidekicks, Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata, have only a walk-on --- another probable source of distress for George's devotees.
WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER is a gamble in two senses. George not only diverges from the traditional crime-solving formula, she is also a white, well-heeled American presuming to get inside the lives and heads of black, struggling Londoners. No matter how well intentioned, this effort will certainly be seen by some people as patronizing rather than courageous.
Racial politics aside, the book reminds me strongly of the nineteenth-century English social novels in which middle-class authors addressed the evils of early industrial slums and factories. Like Benjamin Disraeli's SYBIL, it emphasizes that rich and poor, although they ostensibly live in the same city, are really "two nations." (When Joel ventures into Belgravia, the elegant neighborhood where the Lynleys live, it is a world so alien it might as well be the North Pole.) Like Dickens's books, it is narrated by a lofty omniscient voice and features a large cast of characters. Striving, upwardly mobile Kendra Osborne, the children's aunt, is trying to establish a massage practice, and her boyfriend, Dix, is a prize-winning bodybuilder. Teenaged Vanessa is a furious victim of sexual abuse. There are Dickensian villains, too, evil geniuses of the street who take pleasure in manipulating and torturing boys like Joel and Toby. The do-gooders --- social workers, writing teachers, mentors --- are mostly white and usually impotent, foreigners who don't really know the language of the neighborhood or its people.
Speaking of language, the dialogue in this book is largely in the black argot of London. There is a point to this --- time and again George emphasizes that educated people like Kendra are perfectly adept at standard English (what the kids call her "Lady Muck" voice) and can pull it out on appropriate occasions (as when talking to the authorities). Thus the see-sawing between slangy and refined accents comes to represent a tension that dominates the whole book: the choice between sticking with the lousy deal that fate has handed you and trying to escape into a better, less limited existence. But the dialect gets to be a bit much after a while --- I felt as if I were listening to a minstrel show. George's decision to reproduce the vernacular may be phonetically accurate, but I'm not sure that it serves her book well.
The novel is absorbing, albeit overlong. The characters are engaging and poignant; you want to protect them, prevent their descent into crime, peril, loss of dignity and selfhood. In crossing class and racial lines, George is doing something most genre writers wouldn't: setting out to expose the ugly underside of offenses so politely solved in the usual English mystery. This is a more realistic book than the usual thriller insofar as it recognizes that most crimes originate in problematic socioeconomic conditions ("[T]here were forces at work far larger than the Campbell children or their aunt, making North Kensington a place unsafe for harbouring or advancing dreams") and it has no detective hero to hand the reader a neat explanation-cum-solution.
But I'm not sure we read mysteries for a picture of society as it really is. I think we read them for reassurance: Their conventions make us feel that crimes aren't just random acts but possess some logic, and that those who commit them can be unmasked and punished. And I missed Lynley and (especially) Havers. Part of the pleasure of a series is encountering familiar people, in particular the guiding presence of brilliant crime-solvers who give shape to the story and balance to the moral scales. Although I respect George for challenging herself and her readers, WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER is more a worthy experiment than a successful mystery.
Still, I appreciate a writer who surprises me rather than banks on the same bestselling blueprint. What in heaven's name will Elizabeth George do next? Your guess is as good as mine.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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