As a kid, I was hooked on an anthology of mystery stories that included Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band,’ the G.K. Chesterton Father Brown story, ‘The Invisible Man’, and another of the great ‘locked room’ mysteries, ‘The Problem of Cell 13.’ The author of this last story was Jacques Futrell, a journalist, who, bizarrely enough, went down in the Titanic along with a stack of unpublished manuscripts. The desire to know “who did it” was thus planted at an early age, it took much longer to learn that while the solving of a crime may be one of the great engines of fiction, it is not entirely respectable. The Orhan Pamuk novel I enjoyed the most is My Name is Red which is also a mystery story, although now that I think of it, I can’t for the life of me remember what the crime was, let alone who did it.

Later in life, I devoured all of Raymond Chandler, happy to learn the difference between a Sherlock Holmes style detective (the embodiment of pure reason) and a private eye like Philip Marlowe who kept reason in a bottom drawer along with a bottle of rye whisky. But I started to read less and less detective fiction – partly because I was busy writing a mystery novel of my own. With the English publication this February of my The Adventure of the Second Wife I was joining the community of mystery writers- and I found myself unprepared.

So I have been catching up on detective fiction. My old friend Philip Marlowe and the  lone wolf detective whose vocation destroys any chance of a having a real life made it difficult me to fully engage with Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, although I confess the plots in a television series sort of way are sort of exciting. But I have settled for a book by George Green called The Kingdoms of Savannah which does the job of what I think a novel should do, which is create its own world, one, with the final page, you are reluctant to leave.

In this case, that world is the American south and Dawes unlocks the gate to this universe initially not through the imagery he creates but the language he uses.  To explain, in a roundabout fashion, let me describe meeting the then New York Times correspondent Rigg Bragg who is another Southern writer. This was some time ago when I had a journalism fellowship at Michigan University and my fellow Fellows invited him to talk to us. It turned out to be a divisive event. Half of us applauded the way he used unusual language to write ordinary news. The other half were suspicious – maybe a little bit jealous on how he traded off his Southern American origins- the imagery and the cadence of regional dialect, in order to turn ordinary news reporting into a folksy, artistic form. It’s not that he wrote in dialect itself or in an English that was in some sense not “proper” – but that having a regional identity gave the language a boldness. 

I think a parallel is the way English (British) writers of English can be intimidated by Irish or Scottish writers or those schooled in a different tradition. There is a sensitivity that someone like myself– schooled in the English language equivalent of Hochdeutsch would have hard pressed to contemplate when I was writing for the London-based Times newspaper. At the same time, I think exposure to this sort of prose did inspire me to be more daring in the way I wrote.  We are all in search of the visual metaphor that in a single moment, tells the whole story but we also search for the one word on expression that makes prose more dynamic.

I won’t go into a detailed description of the plot of The Kingdoms of Savannah except to say that there is one– and good enough to win this year’s Gold Dagger, the award by the Crime Writers' Association of the United Kingdom for the best crime novel of the year.  In biref, a down-on-her luck contract archaeologist is kidnapped, her friend killed- but what could she possibly know that would merit such a terrible fate? It is a story of social class and corruption and of how the misdeeds of the past can inspire the crimes of the present. It is also an ensemble piece where the central ‘character’ is an entire dynasty.  A family, some of whose members live on the street and others who rule the city’s most sophisticated drawing rooms, some of whom are descended from slaves, other from their owners. It is not until we are well into the book that we even suspect which one of the protagonists will go on to solve the crime. It is about the city of Savannah and what lies below the surface – fittingly the final scenes take place in the slime of the main sewage system.  Best of all, there is a truly scary villain.

But it was the language, the choice of words, the rhythm of the sentences that won me over.