When it comes to gritty, human detectives based in Britain, readers have a whole lot to choose from: Colin Dexter's Morse, Ruth Rendell's Wexford, PD James' Dalgliessh, Peter Lovesey's Diamond, Ian Rankin's Rebus, Rginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe, and quite a few others. And well, I would like to add Peter James' Roy Grace to the list. He has been around for a while, our Roy, but this was his the book in which he made his debut, accompanied by the trademark "Dead"in the title (all books featuring Roy Grace have Dead in the title, for the record - a deadly quirk. Pun intended).
And well, it is quite a debut, I must concede. The book revolves around a stag night prank that goes horribly wrong. How horribly? Well, picture this:
Your friends get you drunk a few days before your marriage.
They then put you in a coffin. Dump it in the ground. Put soil over it.
All you have is a porn magazine, a bottle of whisky, a torch and a walkie talkie with which to talk to those who buried you.
Then those who buried you, promptly go off and have an auto accident.
So it's just you, in a coffin. Under ground. With air coming in through a tube. And a walkie talkie with no one answering (its recipients are in the hospital, and some are in the other world.)
Enter Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a man who gets drawn into the search for the missing groom. Incidentally, his own wife went missing a long time ago, He has never quite gotten over her, even though he has tried (a colleague registers him on a dating site for good measure). And he is not in his superiors'good books for having admitted to using a 'medium' in the process of solving a case (detectives are supposed to be methodical, not spiritual, at least not officially).
He may have an imposing physique, but Grace is a sensitive soul, and it is this streak of humanity that makes the book work. Yes, it has the banter between colleagues, the cynical remarks about superiors who are more concerned about budgets than solving crimes. But by the time you get midway through the book, you are already in well, Graceland. You are wondering if his next date will work out, if he WILL ever have a next date, whether he is a crackpot or just a man determined to use every means at his disposal to solve a crime?
And what a crime it is. For, things keep twisting and turning - is the missing man's gorgeous fiancee just a bit too vulnerable? Why is the man's partner acting strange? As James tells the story from different perspectives - the most chilling being that of the to-be groom who has been buried alive and is desperately trying to get out - you get sucked into the plot. There are some surprises and a fair injection of action towards the end as well. Honestly, I thought things got a bit out of hand towards the end...almost Hollywood-ian, but when the dust settled, one man stood tall among all the carnage.
Roy Grace.
The man is a cocktail of Wexford and Diamond, mixing wry humour with bouts of depression, working for the law but refusing to cow down to authority, and above all, being human. Dead Simple is worth a read just to get acquainted with him.
Does he find his wife? And what about those dates? I intend to review all his books in sequence. So stay tuned. In the meantime, if you like detective fiction and good police procedurals, buy Dead Simple. It is fluently written and notwithstanding some twists and coincidences that seem right out Hardy, a very engrossing read. The four hundred odd pages it spanned whirred past me in a day and a half of frenetic reading - the small chapter sizes do tempt one to read "just one more"!
Read Dead Simple. To find out who Roy Grace is. Oh, and to be entertained. Thoroughly.
Dead Simple
By Peter James
Pan MacMillan
Rs 249 (on Amazon)
(You can buy the book from Amazon by clicking here.)
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