Crime imaginary and real

Press, 30 August 1980, Page 17

Crime imaginary and real

Blood Secrets. By Craig Jones. Corgi, 1980. 204 pp. $3,90 (paperback). Lake of Darkness. By Ruth Rendell. Hutchinson, 1980. 201 pp. $16.95. The Rat Report. By Constantine Fitzgibbon. Hutchinson, 1980. $18.15. Forty Years of Murder. By Professor Keith Simpson. Panther, 1980. 386 pp. $5.25 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Ken Strongman)

Dipping into “Blood Secrets” the reader will feel that something like this plot had to happen in these days of prepackaged publications with authors out to make a financial killing and publishers trying hard to persuade an indifferent public to buy books. The search for the latest stunning, shocking, horrendous, unforgettable, chilling story continues. Here we are with a crime novel hinging on incest, and what could be more stunning etc, than that. It will be animals next Still, of its sort “Blood Secrets” is not badly written and it is reasonably cheap, although in more ways than one.

One either likes Ruth Rendell, the author of “Lake of Darkness,” or not. She writes well and has been described by the eminent Edmund Crispin as the best woman ■ crime writer since Sayers, Christie, Allingham and Marsh. Crispin is wrong. For a start she is not as good as P. D. James. Also, her books centre* on things supernatural, night chills, the occult, the tarot, and so on. If readers like such things, Ruth Rendell is good at producing them. If not, “Lake of Darkness,” like her other books, is just not worth the money. Constantine Fitzgibbon, author of “The Rat Report,” is a patchy writer of prolific output, his best work of fiction probably being "’When the

Kissing had to Stop.” In "The Rat Report” he has produced a most unusual book with the hero being a telepathic laboratory rat called Crocus, who, via a simple, middle-aged Irish medium, is sending a report in mierodots of sound to some unknown beings, concerned with the last 500 years of human domination of the earth. Dr Desmund Burke is aware of this rat through his Dublin-based researches into parapsychology. By easy stages the superpowers become involved, enormous decoding machines are brought to bear, and we find out what rats think of us. Times goes out of joint, people swap appearances, Dr Burke dies, and poor old Crocus is exhausted. If readers like a mixture of crime, spying,. futurism, space fantasy and science fiction, then Fitzgibbon has provided it. The result is all a bit much. The publication of a paperback version of Keith Simpson’s autobiography, “Forty Years of Murder,” will be welcomed by all avid students of crime, at least if their interest embraces the factual as well as the fictitious. Keith Simpson was London University’s first Professor of Forensic Medicine and he was Home Office pathologist for many years. He must know more about the famous and the horrific crimes in Britain over the last 50 years than anyone, and he has put it all in gossipy detail into his autobiography. All the gruesome elements are there: Dobkin, Hanratty, Christie and Evans, Bodkin Adams and the Krays, even Lord Lucan. There are stranglers and poisoners, axes and deformed hands, gangsters and undissolved gallstones. Need one say more? There are even photographs, including a few of Simpson himself. Just as well there is nothing to the theory of a criminal type; it seems to me that Simpson has an odd look in his eye.