Review of Dead Man’s Land by Robert Ryan (2012, Simon Schuster)

Although now well beyond normal service age Dr John Watson has re-enlisted to serve a front-line medical doctor in the Great War. He’s role is to assess and treat wounded soldiers in a casualty clearing station and to teach the new method of blood transfusion to other doctors. The carnage is terrible, with an endless stream of bloody victims to attend. When one of his charges dies, his jaw clamped shut, eyes bulging and his skin tinged blue, Watson suspects foul-play. His suspicion is further aroused by a number carved in the victim’s chest and rumours of similar deaths among the same regiment. He might be without his friend, Sherlock Holmes, but Watson has learned from his time with the master detective and he’s determined to get to the truth even if that means risking his life in the trenches.

Dead Man’s Land is the first book in the Dr Watson series set during the First World War. After parting ways with Sherlock Holmes, Watson has re-enlisted as a medical officer and headed to the trenches of Flanders where part of his mission is to extol the virtues of the new method of blood transfusion. His first post is in a relatively quiet section in a casualty clearing station where he discovers the Leigh Pals, a regiment he met a couple of months earlier in Egypt, are serving. When one of the pals dies after a blood transfusion Dr Watson suspects foul play. His initial investigation suggests this is not the first such death. Someone is using the cover of battlefield carnage to commit murder and Watson sets out to identify and capture him. Ryan does a nice job of building a story around Dr Watson and bringing him to the fore of the story, and in constructing a serial murder tale in the frontline area of Flanders. There is a good sense of place and historicisation as to conditions and operations at the front and medical services, and the dimensions of class and hierarchies within services (military and medical) are nicely realised. Beyond Watson, the nursing staff and the Leigh Pals are well realised and engaging, especially suffragette voluntary aid detachment nurse Mrs Gregson. The core of the plot is a nice murder mystery that has a good twist to it, however it has a couple of subplots that were a bit of a distraction involving a German sniper and Winston Churchill that felt like interest padding, and it was a shame in many ways for Holmes to be pulled into the story. Overall, an engaging tale that does a reasonable job of continuing the canon without it feeling overly pastiche.

Review of No Sale by Patrick Conrad (Bitter Lemon Press, 2012, in Dutch 2007)

Victor Cox is a professor of film history and a keen collector of movie paraphernalia and trivia with a soft spot for black and white noir movies.  Coming up to retirement he’s spent so much time watching and studying movies that he sometimes finds it difficult to distinguish between reality and the imaginary.  Seemingly every person or situation bears an uncanny resemblance to a film star or a movie scene.  When his wife is murdered, he becomes a suspect.  And the police become even more intrigued when he can be directly linked to two earlier murders, both of which are based on movie scenes.  Chief Superintendent Fons Luyckx doesn’t believe that Cox had anything to do with the murders, but when two more happen over the next couple of years the evidence seems difficult to refute.  More worryingly, Cox himself becomes increasingly convinced he might be living a double, Jekyll and Hyde, life.

No Sale is a clever, literary crime novel.  It is written and plotted in the style of a noir crime movie, using its stock of characters, sensibilities and tropes, and it is thoroughly intertextual in its make-up, blending together elements of dozens of movies without ever becoming a mere pastiche.  Victor Cox is a wonderful character, drifting somewhere between reality and the imaginary, caught in a plot that Alfred Hitchcock would have delighted in committing to film.  Whilst the resolution had no real surprise, the killer was a choice of three and it was telegraphed from a pretty long way out, and there’s some obvious gaps, such as the lack of any media interest in the cases, especially given how they all link to one person, neither really seemed to matter.  This book was more about the journey, the interconnections, the trivia, the little puzzles, and above all the set of well drawn characters - the lush wife, the wise-guy police officer in love with a prostitute, his by-the-numbers partner who takes everything at face-value, the femme fatale, the innocent victims, the larger-than-life and salt-of-the-earth lowlifes - and how they swirl around Cox.  An enjoyable read, which I’m sure would have been even better if I were a film history buff.