Darkness and Light

The final book in the Frank Elder trilogy.

Once again, Elder is drawn from his Cornish hideaway, this time by his ex-sife, Joanne, who wants him to help a friend find her widowed sister, who has mysteriously gone missing. What Elder finds is a quicksand of memories, at the centre of which is a murder case that was never solved.

“Deftly plotted, beautifully written”

Peter Guttridge, The Observer

“Harvey is as good as they come: a writer of consummate elegance, and deft characterisation, never wasting a word as the plot unfolds in what amounts to a masterclass in crime writing. Gripping and heartbreaking in equal measure, this is a must-read for anyone craving a beautifully written and literate page-turner.”

Mark Billingham, Daily Mail

“John Harvey’s roll continues; no one in Britain is writing better crime fiction.”

Marcel Berlins: The Times

“Darkness & Light is a traditional detective novel, tidily written, neatly structured,with some intriguing glimpses into the personal life of the detective. John Harvey never writes a dull page, and the pacy dialogue and momentum of the investigation from one smooth but plausible villain to another ensure that this novel is compelling fromthe start.”

Joseph Farrell: The Times Literary Supplement

“{Elder’s} private life is delineated with consumate skill. Its’ familiar stuff (broken marriage, resentful grown-up daughter) but the unforced nuances have real richness.”

“Such is Harvey’s commanding skill that we forgive him anything - such as the book’s slowish start and a reliance on some unlikely plot contrivances. We simply relish the adept characterisation and meticulous attention to detail.”

Barry Forshaw: The Independent

“Probably the best we have to offer right now … Part police procedural, part psychological thriller, this pacy tale shows that Harvey knows exactly when to put his foot on the accelerator.”

Henry Sutton: The Mirror

“What began as a deceptively simple disappearance turns into a complex story of psychological motivation and hatred.”

Library Journal (US) Starred review

“Harvey writes superbly about the stoppings and startings that define human relationships, whether within the bounds of acceptable behavior or criminally outside them. He makes us feel the connections between people on both sides of the law – or both sides of sanity – in a way that is both profoundly moving and deeply unsettling. Harvey belongs on the short list of every reader interested in the demilitraized zone where crime fiction and literature meet.”

Bill Ott: Booklist (US) Starred review.

 

Ash and Bone

The second novel featuring Frank Elder, set in London, Nottingham and Cornwall and including more than just a walk-on part for one Charlie Resnick. 'Immaculately engineered thriller... Harvey's book is fast, fluent and exciting, with a pace and assurance that never let's up' Philip Oakes: Literary Review ‘Harvey once again gets everything right, jangling the nerves and plucking the heart-strings — Another marvellous read.’ Reginald Hill

When is a series not a series, when's a procedural not quite a procedural? Having stepped away from the year-on, year-out business of Charlie Resnick, what, after Flesh & Blood, am I getting into here? I remember with an earlier book – I think it was In a True Light, - much back and forth with my then editor about what it was. Was it a thriller? It's not another police procedural, tell me that. She very much wanted me to tell her that. Thrillers, apparently, were what sold. (Move over Reg Hill and tell Ian Rankin that news.) So is Ash & Bone a thriller, then? Second in a thriller series? It's hero, Frank Elder, is the same man as in Flesh & Blood and there are issues with his ex-wife and daughter which will have to be dealt with. But, a few quick trips to Nottingham for old time's sake, let's not have things too much the same. For a while at least, Elder doesn't seem to be the main character at all. And the location's shifted to London in the main, the same north London streets frequented by my private detective Jack Kiley (short stories only so far) and, of course, by Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne. Shake it up a little, move it around. There's some police procedure here, it's true but Elder's on the edge of all that, doing his own slightly edgy thing. And well, it's out there, in the shops, and I find I still quite like it, Maddy Birch especially, eyeing herself in the mirror and snapping her pony tail tight before fastening the Velcro on her protective vest and setting out on an armed raid to bring down Mr Big.

A series? Here am I, some 30,000 words into Darkness & Light and I'm still asking myself that question.

A thriller, is that what it is?

Reviews

There were many who felt that John Harvey was robbed when his novel Flesh & Blood failed to bag the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association main Dagger award last year (the American Sara Paretsky pipped him to the post). Ms Paretsky used her acceptance speech to rail (by proxy) against the iniquities of George Bush's government, but (pace Paretsky) John Harvey casts quite as cold an eye on this country as his American colleague does on the US, but his understated social criticism sports a British patina that is more quietly effective than Paretsky's in-your-face rant. And if there’s any justice, Harvey will pick up this year's Dagger for the trenchantly written Ash & Bone. After dispensing with his series character Charlie Resnick, Harvey’s Flesh & Blood marked a radical new departure for the author, even though his world-weary detective Frank Elder sported a passing resemblance to his predecessor. Elder is not in a good place after the events of Flesh & Blood: there are problems with his ex-wife and daughter that seem to beyond his ability to deal with. But – wait a minute – is Elder the principal character here? While he handles the police procedural business, he doesn't appear until Chapter 4, and the sympathetic and vulnerable female copper Maddy Birch launches the book centre stage, eyeing herself in the mirror and snapping her pony tail tight before fastening the Velcro on her protective vest and setting out on an armed raid to bring down a North London Mr Big. Things go bloodily wrong: the gangster is shot by another policeman who appears to plant a weapon near the dead man. Maddy finds herself steam-rollered in an enquiry that exonerates her unpleasant colleague, but then she finds her troubles are only just beginning. Frank Elder is finding himself unable to cope with his daughter's hostility (she blames him for the psychological trauma she suffered at the hands of a psychopath), and welcomes the opportunity to get back into harness, investigating the murder of a female colleague with whom he had a one-off sexual encounter.

Harvey's ace in the hole was always characterisation, and as if two astringently drawn coppers were not value enough, he throws two more equally memorable female police officers into the mix: Karen, black, and chafing at the casual racism of her colleagues, and the attractive, lonely Vanessa, prone to risky sexual encounters outside office hours. The picture of Britain Harvey paints as backdrop is a dark and minatory place: everywhere from London's Crouch End (where the disused railway line is the site of a murder, to a Lincolnshire in which crumbling houses have been the site of sadistic sexual murders). Harvey’s UK is seemingly at the mercy of an army of barely socialised council estate kids, their small-scale crime mirroring the more serious mayhem committed by their elders. But perhaps the most striking coup in Ash & Bone is a Psycho-like dispatching of a sympathetic major character early in the novel: risky territory indeed.

Barry Forshaw, The Independent

Immaculately engineered thriller beginning with the police takedown of a violent criminal which goes oddly wrong when Det. Supt. Mallory, top cop leading the raid, kills his quarry (‘Textbook’, he said softly, ‘Head and heart.’), with no-one else entirely certain that the dead man was holding a gun when he was shot. DS Maddy Birch, who took part in the raid, has her doubts,but only days later she’s found raped and murdered, lying by a disused railway line in Crouch Hill. No connection between the two events it would seem. But Maddy was once a colleague of DI Frank Elder, now retired but working (whenever he feels so inclined) for the Murder Review Unit, which examines cold and difficult cases. He recalls a fond, though unconsummated, moment between them in the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral and guiltily adds Maddy’s name to his list. At the same time he’s attempting to rescue his daughter Katherine from her affair with a small-time drug dealer who, it appears, is being framed for a major drug possession. Complications ensue, not the least of these an involvement with DS Karen Shields – six feet tall, black and beautiful. Her vitality is enough to burn up Elder’s congenital gloom and, between sifting through clues and police corruption, he rediscovers sex. About time: no man deserves it more. Some fine detective work, with Mallory’s awful past recalled by an ageing tart who was there (young and lovely) when the nastiest bits happened. Closure on Maddy’s rape and murder too. The Murder Review Unit has earned its keep.

Harvey’s book is fast, fluent and exciting, with a pace and assurance that never lets up, It’s like hearing a fine jazz musician hitting the right tune, in the right key and at the right tempo. Turning the pages you can taste the confidence. What’s also interesting is how Harvey hangs on to his old characters (not only, I feel, to remind readers that they’re still alive and kicking). Charlie Resnick makes an appearance and Elder’s ex-wife also guests self-destructively. They have their uses, of course. They keep the plot turning. They keep relationships warm. But, most importantly, they keep the books populated. In Harvey’s novels, however bleak the action may be, there are few empty spaces. Life goes on.

Philip Oakes, Literary Review

John Harvey’s Flesh and Blood was the most impressive crime fiction I read last year. Can Harvey repeat the quality with Ash And Bone? The former detective inspector Frank Elder is again compelled to leave his lonely Cornish retirement: his unstable daughter is out of control, then Maddy Birch, a fellow copper with whom he shared an unsatisfactory sexual encounter is found murdered. Not long before, she had participated in a shoot-out in which a targeted criminal and a young policeman had died. Was her death linked to that, or committed by a stranger, or a former lover?

Elder patiently helps to sift through the evidence while trying to resolve his personal dilemmas. Is Ash and Bone as good as last year’s offering. No. Is it still one of the best crime books you’re likely to read this year? Yes.

Marcel Berlins, The Times

Finally, a reliable treat for all English crime aficionados: John Harvey is back with Ash and Bone, taking up where he left off with the Silver Dagger prize-winning Flesh and Blood, the first in a new series to feature DI Frank Elder. Here, Elder is once again persuaded out of retirement to investigate the death of another police officer. But what really preoccupies him is his 17-year old daughter, who is running wild – a guilt grip for Frank, who recognises that it was his involvement with a case that led to Katherine being so disturbed.

Harvey continues to delight all readers who relish his hard-boiled, gritty style and recognise the authenticity of his English inner-city settings.

Carla McKay, Daily Mail

John Harvey’s second outing for Frank Elder is Ash & Bone. Retired, divorced and lonely, Frank lives in the Cornish countryside, content to have left the police and ignoring pleas to join other retired detectives in a cold case unit. But he makes an exception when a policewoman he knew is murdered, and then finds himself caught up in another case. Harvey deftly manages the two separate threads, which are linked by the theme of suspected police corruption. Elder is a complex and sympathetic personality, and his investigations make a wholly satisfying read.

Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

Flesh and Blood

Flesh and Blood Frank Elder is the main character in the new novel, FLESH AND BLOOD, published by William Heinemann on April 1st 2004 in the UK and by Carroll Graff on the 4th July 2004 in the US. FLESH AND BLOOD has been awarded The CWA Mystery & Thriller Book Club Silver Dagger for Fiction, 2004. For more on the awards see the CWA web site

US Reviews

“Being fixated on the past is a birthright of the Brits: after all,they’ve got so much recorded history to be mired in. John Harvey, whose Charlie Resnick police procedurals are immortals of the genre, has written a new non-Resnick mystery set on England’s wild western coast and absolutely drenched in memory and twisted desire.

Flesh & Blood (Carroll & Graf, $25) finds Detective Inspector Frank Elder ensconced in a lonely retirement cottage in Cornwall, mulling over the ruin of his long marriage and terrorized almost nightly by a nightmare involving vicious cats and a decaying corpse. Elder is also plagued, by day,by misgivings about the cases he didn’t solve, particularly the disappearance back in 1988 of a 16-year-old girl named Susan Blacklock. Other girls have also gone missing in England around that time, and two young men — a psycho named Alan McKeirnan and his puppyish follower, Shane Donald — were convicted of abducting and murdering one of them. Now Donald is about to be released from prison, and that regrettable event triggers Elder into reinvestigating Susan’s disappearance. When Donald breaks parole and another young girl is murdered, Elder’s detective work takes on an urgent meaning beyond the absolution of his own guilt.

Flesh & Blood is a superb mystery — excruciatingly suspenseful, rich in character and all too real in its depiction of the horrific possibilities lurking in the margins of the mundane. The bloodless betrayal revealed at the very end of this story is more shocking in its cool malevolence than any of the gruesome acts of violence that preceded it.”

Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post, August 2004

“Tight plotting, gritty dialogue, sympathetic characters and a lot of gray areas are the trademarks of a master still in great form. Highly recommended.”

Library Journal, July 2004 Starred review

“What this novel shares with the Resnick series … is Harvey’s unmatched ability to get inside the minds and hearts of his criminals and the environments that produce them. Evil is a presence in Harvey’s world, but it is never an unexplained presence, and those who commit evil acts always wear tragically human faces. Harvey remains a sensitive but never sentimental chronicler of the underclass, and it’s great to have him back where he belongs.”

Bill Ott, Booklist, May 2004

“Mr Harvey is known for his earlier series of books featuring the jazz-loving police detective Charlie Resnick (who makes as cameo appearance in Flesh & Blood). This new book is even grittier that the Resnick novels — but just as thoughtful and emotionally gratifying. It seems past time for Mr Harvey to be recognized — alongside Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson — as a modern master of the smart, hard-edged British police-procedural.”

Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal, July 2004

“If anyone could make you feel sorry for a serial killer, it’s John Harvey, who always writes with tender feeling about commonplace people — killers among them — damaged by criminal violence. Harvey’s sympathetic British detective, Charlie Resnick, is no longer on the job, but Flesh & Blood introduces a similar, if thinner-skinned specimen in Frank Elder, a former cop who comes out of retirement when the chief suspect in an old, cold case is released from prison. Shane Donald, battered and childlike himself, definitely had a cruel hand in the torture killing of one high school girl in 1989, and he might very well be involved in current disappearances of other teenage girls. But did he really kill the 16-year-old Susan Blacklock all those years ago? Major and minor characters alike emerge in vivid colour as Elder heads up the North Sea coast to interview the families of the victims. That Harvey should put so much warmth into these sad portraits in no surprise, since life studies of bruised hearts are what he does best. But until the too-busy plot loses touch with Shane, the compassionate understanding that Harvey brings to this killer is an astonishment.”

Marilyn Stasio, The New York Review of Books, July 2004

UK Reviews

“On the surface Flesh and Blood is a straightforward, if unusually thoughtful, account of the hunt for a serial killer, but there is more to it than that. As the narrative develops and the tension builds, the relationships between the many sets of parents and children in the novel become as important as the race to find the murderer. Among the damaged children here are some who are happy .... in particular the attractive Kate Elder. It is when she is under attack that the novel’s main theme of fathers and daughters comes into play. Just as the novel is more complex and interesting than its form suggests it will be, so Harvey’s unemphatic style gives it spaciousness. Emotions are recreated with the lightest of touches and physical description is kept to a minimum. With a sentence or two, often simply registering the colour and mood of the sky, he carries the reader from the tip of Cornwall to the Midlands. Flesh and Blood is a sad novel, and often painful, but it has thrills as well as subtleties, and the relationship between Elder and his daughter makes even the bleakest bits bearable.”

Natasha Cooper, Times Literary Supplement

“Troubled, haunting novel about memories of crimes past reawakened by crimes present… As much a meditation on middle age and Middle England as it is a study of the crimes themselves, with harvey fusing time and place, motive and milieu into a backdrop against which lives are lived, spoiled and frequently wasted.

… There are several narrative strands, which join up as the story proceeds. There is no fictional glue: things come together because they fit and because they must. Harvey handles his characters and their circumstances with extraordinary tact, which in no way slackens the tension or slows down the chase. What matters is that you really care. This concern, woven into the texture of the book, is the stamp of a major novel: thrilling, urgent, important.”

Philip Oakes, Literary Review, February 2004

 

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