As Peter Robinson says, more or less, for a guy who's thought of as a novelist, he's written rather a lot of short stories. And as he adds, again more or less, we're lucky that McClelland & Stewart thinks enough of his work to put them together into this fine collection.
Ten of the 11 have been published before, mostly in crime anthologies edited by such luminaries as Karin Slaughter, Otto Penzler, John Harvey, Michael Connelly and Anne Perry. One, Blue Christmas, appeared in a limited edition by noted mystery publisher Crippen & Landru in 2005, and another, the 100-page novella Like a Virgin, is an Alan Banks story written especially for this collection. Two other entries, The Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle and Blue Christmas, are also DCI Alan Banks stories, which adds up to a substantial fix for the Banks addicts among us.
The Price of Love: And Other Stories
, by Peter Robinson, McClelland & Stewart, 313 pages, $32.99
In the first of these, a wealthy businessman is murdered in his study with a brass fire poker while his wife is off at a poker evening, playing Texas hold 'em with a group of rich, powerful friends. Banks and DI Annie Cabbot come to suspect the dead man's business partner, but eventually discover that the two men are partners as well in an entirely different, and unsavoury, activity. Banks and Cabbot don't believe the partner committed the murder, so they begin looking more carefully at the poker-playing ladies.
Blue Christmas features Banks and DC Winsome Jackman, who has drawn the short straw for Christmas duties. But she calls in Banks – who doesn't really have anything else on – when a 42-year-old housewife turns up missing and then is spotted wandering, dazed, through the village of Swainshead on Christmas day. The urgency factor is turned up considerably when she is spotted sitting high on the Swainshead Viaduct. It falls to Banks to climb out there with her and try to talk her into coming down to safety.
The title character in the story Cornelius Jubb is a black U.S. soldier in 1943, posted near a village in Yorkshire. He makes the acquaintance of the narrator, a retired teacher and one-time police detective now acting as a Special Constable because of the war, and the two become occasional drinking pals. Then a local woman is beaten and raped, and Pfc Jubb is arrested, charged and, eventually, convicted. According to U.S. army law, rape is a capital crime. The constable-narrator is convinced Cornelius is innocent, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, but can't stop the course of justice, or perhaps injustice.
In The Magic of Your Touch, a musician steals a tune from another man, becomes famous and wealthy as a result, and then discovers the real cost of his thievery. In another story, The Ferryman's Beautiful Daughter, a group of newcomers establishes a commune on an island, much to the displeasure of a local preacher, and by the end of summer a young woman is dead. Walking the Dog is set in Toronto's Beaches neighbourhood and features two dog owners who meet on the beach while walking their dogs and fall into an affair and, ultimately, a murderous plot with a nasty hook.
The piece de resistance, of course, is the Alan Banks novella, Like a Virgin
The Cherub Affair is also set in Toronto, but in this case an educated private detective – a newspaper dubs him “the PhD PI” – is hired by a beautiful woman to untangle a bloody domestic murder for which her brother has been arrested. Birthday Dance reprises the story of Salome and John the Baptist in a particularly gruesome tale of revenge. And in the title story, The Price of Love, a young boy on holidays with his mother and his stepfather finds a badge buried in the sand of a Blackpool beach, and it becomes a totem for him as he begins to investigate the death of his policeman father, who died during an armed robbery.
The piece de resistance, of course, is the Alan Banks novella, Like a Virgin, that concludes the book, and which is interesting in several different ways. It's a framing tale that begins with Banks contemplating an official envelope. His reflections take him back more than 20 years, to 1985, when he was a detective inspector, and the series of murders and personal disasters that led to him to transfer to Eastvale, Yorkshire, taking a promotion to detective chief inspector and, not incidentally, commencing the fictional career that has produced 18 novels to date.
The murder victims are London prostitute/strippers, and it takes a good deal of hard, slogging police work in back streets and sleazy clubs, not to mention ugly situations with colleagues and the press, to reach a conclusion that can only be described as unsatisfactory. And all this is not to mention Banks's dissolving marriage and his desultory affair with another copper. Much is resolved in the closing part of the frame story when Banks opens the envelope and makes a phone call.
The writing is, as always with Robinson, colourful and evocative, and the characters are brilliant in their unpersonable way. This book is a must for Peter Robinson completists, of course, but also for anyone who appreciates good stories well told.
H.J. Kirchhoff is the deputy Books editor for The Globe and Mail.
