Review of Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton (2013, Arrow Books)

Writer Dean Quinner has finally got his wish and The Tunnels, his first movie, has started to shoot in his home city of Liverpool, with Ben Noone, a charismatic Californian, in the lead role.  Working on the shoot is Terry Peters and his nephew, Nicky.  Not long after filming has started Nicky’s parents, suburban dentists, are murdered and the teenager has disappeared.  DCI Frank Keane of Merseyside’s Major Incident Team is assigned the case.  Newly promoted, recently separated and involved in a messy affair with a colleague, Keane is ready to stir things up, but his boss wants a softly, softly approach given the value of the movie industry to Liverpool, the celebrity status of one of the movie’s investors, and the interest of the media.  Still getting used to office politics in the upper echelons of the force and not known for his softly approach to cases, when another body linked to the film is discovered Keane continues to blunder on certain he has the perpetrator in his sights despite the lack of evidence and warnings to drop his line of enquiry.

Down Amongst the Dead Men is a book of two halves.  The first half is set in Liverpool and is a very good, straightforward police procedural.  Chatterton immerses the reader in the world of DCI Frank Keane, DS Em Harris and their colleagues and sets up an intriguing puzzle involving the death of two dentists and the disappearance of their son, who was working on a movie shoot.  The characterization and social interactions are nicely portrayed and the story is riveting and compelling with a nice blend of personal tribulations, police politics, and difficult investigation.  The second half shifts the action to Los Angeles and becomes much more thriller-like in its style, with Keane operating at the edge or outside of the procedures that gave him power but boxed him in in Liverpool.  The plot links Keane up with Menno Koopman, his former boss who also made an appearance in the first book, who has flown in from Australia to help with the investigation.  Whilst this part of the book is gripping, culminating in a tense finale, it is also less believable in substance given its political turn and presence of a shadowy organisation and I just didn’t buy the ending.  If Chatterton had found a way of wrapping up the story in Liverpool this would have been a five star read for me.  Nevertheless, it was engaging and entertaining read despite the shift in location and style and I’m very much looking forward to the next DCI Keane case. 

Review of Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician by Michelle Williams (Constable, 2010)

Fancying a change from working as a health care assistant, Michelle Williams decides to apply for a job as a mortuary technician.  She survives the preliminary interview where she’s watches her first body be eviscerated and is successful in the formal interview.  What follows is hands-on, on-the-job training, that wouldn’t be for the faint hearted.  Over the course of the year she learns how to deal with the dead and their surviving relatives.  And all manner of bodies pass across the mortuary table, meeting their maker in a variety of ways from natural deaths to tragic suicides to bizarre accidents.

Down Among the Dead Men is a curious read.  Some of it is fascinating, especially the various stories relating to the different deaths, the work of the mortuary team, and their interrelationships.   Some of it is mundane and lacking in any real depth or insight, mostly relating to Williams’ home life.  The writing in general is weak and flat and lacking spark, humour, meaningful reflexivity and some contextual history relating to mortuary business.  The narrative feels more like a stream of structured anecdotes rather than crafted story telling.  Indeed, this is a long way from autobiographical yarns of James Herriott or Gerald Durrell.  The cover quote states: ‘What is it like to work in a mortuary? Nothing like you’d expect, actually ...’  Actually, it was exactly like I expected and there are no great insights revealed by the book.  Overall, the fascinating stuff just about saves the book, but it could have been so much more in the hands of a skilled ghost writer.