The Case Has Altered

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by Anthony Lejeune

A Certain Justice, by P. D. James (Knopf, 400 pp., $25)

Road Rage, by Ruth Rendell (Crown, 344 pp., $25)

10-Lb. Penalty, by Dick Francis (Putnam, 273 pp., $24.95)

Murder Book, by Richard Rayner (Houghton Mifflin, 357 pp., $25)

The Case Has Altered, by Martha Grimes (Henry Holt, 370 pp., $24)

A/K/A Jane, by Maureen Tan (Mysterious Press, 292 pp., $22)

A Holly, Jolly Murder, by Joan Hess (Dutton, 265 pp., $22.95)

The Edith Wharton Murders, by Lev Raphael (St. Martin's, 297 pp., $21.95)

Mr. Lejeune is NR's longtime London correspondent.

'SHOW the jury pictures of the violated body of a dead child, tender as a fledgling, and some atavistic voice within always whispered 'someone ought to pay for this.' The need for vengeance, so easy to confuse with the imperatives of Justice, always worked for the prosecution. The jury didn't want to convict the wrong man, but they did need to convict someone." Does that passage chime a little bell of recent relevance? It was written, of course, months before the Louise Woodward case but suggests an adventitious extra which A Certain Justice provides (and which, oddly, hours of television coverage failed to supply): a glimpse behind the scenes of the British legal system, throwing some light on the differences and similarities in the work of trial lawyers on the two sides of the Atlantic.

The scene is laid almost entirely within a single set of barristers' chambers in London's Middle Temple, one of the four ancient Inns of Court, where quiet gardens and fountains, hall and common room, and arcane formalities contrast with the unsentimental professionalism, personal ambition, jealousies, and petty squabbles of the lawyers and their clerks. P. D. James paints an accurate, if unflattering, picture of the daily routine; there is not much Rumpolesque geniality here. Primarily, though, being a noted detective-story writer, she takes the puzzle-setting and -solving side of her job with proper seriousness. The chief clerk arrives one morning to find an abrasive female barrister gorily murdered. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are summoned from Scotland Yard to begin the business of forensic examination and the questioning of witnesses. Lady James treats her police rather more kindly than her lawyers: Dalgliesh is the symbol of decency and courteous authority. After much exploring of character and circumstance, and some observation of social decline, a briefly violent climax occurs, followed by a gentle debate about what may really have occurred. Good writing overwhelms a degree of improbability. Here, exemplified, is the classic English mystery novel at a very distinguished level.

The last government made P. D. James a Life Peer to represent the Conservative interest; her near-coeval Ruth Rendell has been elevated to the House of Lords by the present Labour government. Lady Rendell, who began by writing fairly orthodox detective stories, usually featuring Chief Inspector Wexford, has branched out, under her own name and as Barbara Vine, into various other types of crime fiction and psychological mystery. Their delving into dark regions of the mind and their often seedy settings have appealed to highbrows, but, unlike most modern authors whom highbrows admire, Lady Rendell is a brilliant plotter keeping always one more twist in hand. Road Rage, unfortunately, does not show her talents at their best. She has reverted to Wexford, which she feels obliged to do from time to time, if only to satisfy readers who were weaned on television versions of her earlier novels; and Wexford --unlike Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, whose creators also tired of them -- seems too colorless to carry a less than satisfactory narrative.

In this episode his wife has been kidnapped and is being held hostage, among an apparently random group of people, to prevent the building of an ugly new highway across a beautiful stretch of Sussex countryside. Much of the book then becomes a familiar kind of suspense tale, although things are predictably not quite what they seem. Lady Rendell writes too skillfully ever to be dull, but the twists challenge credulity, and, for once, she allows her political, or social, prejudices to point, prematurely and therefore damagingly, at the solution.

Even more disappointing is Dick Francis's 10-Lb. Penalty. Francis, too, possesses a remarkable, probably unlearnable, gift of narrative; from the first page the reader is carried forward in a warm flow. The gift has not deserted him -- this is a perfectly readable book -- but is penalized by gratuitous handicaps. The narrator, while behaving like the customary Francis hero --sensible, resourceful, brave -- is, throughout most of the book, only 17 years old, and boys of that age, sophisticated though some of them may be, simply do not think or talk in this way. He is an amateur jockey (essential for Francis's fans, who require at least a slight equine element), helping his father in a parliamentary election. Francis always adds a specialist subject, and in this book it is grassroots electioneering -- which seems thin (perhaps because we all know too much about it) compared with his usual expertise. Attempted murder, as well as embittered rivalry, obtrudes. Without success. End of story.