Neither Slow nor fast, but has momentum and delightful writing

Why We Die is the third of the Oxford-Zoe Boehm series (which has 4 books so far), and while nowhere near as good reading as the Slough House-Slow Horses series, I have run out of that series and so have to settle for second best. That said, Mick Herron’s books pretty much all follow a particular formula – which is quite comforting and pleasant for the reader – whereby the start tends to be a lot of setting up and therefore quite slow, where the significance of whatever you are reading is not immediately obvious, but of course, all the threads will tie up, you will get more and more invested in the characters, and in the second half, the plotline will boil up and action will happen fast and furiously.

So it is with Why We Die, where there are four key parties: Zoe of course, the widow of private eye Joe, who continues to ply her/his trade; Tim Whitby, a grieving widower who wants to come to the rescue of an unknown woman he meets at a hotel; Katrina Blake, the unknown woman, sporting a giant bruise on her face, from walking into a door, she claims. And finally, the Dunstan brothers, the villains, psychopath Arkle, Baxter who is Katrina’s husband, and Trent, the somewhat subnormal and much abused youngest brother. There is a good secondary cast as well, developed just enough to be credible without becoming caricatures. All the characters converge on a hunt for money and revenge, the action moving between Oxford to Totnes (Devon) to London. As always, it is extremely and wonderfully English in its landscape, social-setting, geography, etc.

For me, the great pleasure in a Herron whodunnit is less the plotline and more his writing style and dry humour. There is the typical British self-deprecation of course:

“The English were supposed to be repressed – beaten to a pulp by the weather and an ineradicable sense of loss of empire. So why was everyone so bloody cheerful?” (p7)

A lot of Herron’s humour lies in part in how his sentences meld seamlessly from the abstract/profound/symbolic, to the prosaic:

“Morbidity was starting to stain her outlook; starting to taste like the air she breathed. Which this morning had mostly been other people’s exhaust fumes” (p42)

Another key attractive feature of Herron’s writing is how he delights in subverting expectation, and framing things in such a way to keep the reader guessing and off balance, in a enjoyable way:

“Once inside, the first thing Tim had done had been to pour himself a drink. It would also have been the second, if drinking the first hadn’t intervened” (p222).

Dialogue is Herron’s greatest strength, and his banter is always quick and sharp:

“The car in question was from her local garage; lent by Jeff who’d tended her Sunny through most of its recent illnesses and who had accepted its demise with equanimity. ‘I’d have given it six months, max.’ ‘Thanks for the sympathy.’ ‘Yeah, well. You weren’t planning on putting it out to stud, were you?’ ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I hadn’t organised a Viking funeral either.’ [Zoe’s car was burnt.] He showed her some used cars…’And you’ll only be happy,’ he said, ‘when they give them away with boxes of cornflakes.’ ‘It’d have to be the supermarket brand,’ Zoe said. ‘Lend me a car, Jeff?’ ‘How long for?’ ‘…Couple of years?’ So now she had a Beetle until Wednesday – an orange Beetle. ‘Sometimes I have to follow people’ she’d reminded him. ‘Have you anything in taupe?’ ‘I’m straight, Zoe, I’ve never heard of taupe.’” (p60-61)

I could read this kind of witticism for ever!

So no, this is not one of the wonderful, timeless Slow Horses novels, but it has good momentum once past the set up of the start, developing at the entirely predictable Herron pacing of pretty much all his whodunnits, with many unexpected twists and turns along the way, and characterised with his sharp, edgy humour. It was a quick read, page-turning, and overall, fun.

---