A Commonplace Killing By Siân Busby

To approach a novel where the foreword is a eulogy to the author from her grieving husband sets a degree of tension, will she, Siân Busby, overshadow, overpower, the narrative.  There is a caution in reading this, the final act of a literary life. I was thankful that in actual fact there was very little sense that this was the work of someone who knew they were terminally ill, only by over stretching the analogies would you make any of the characters a proxy for Siân.  It was only at the penultimate page that I experienced a moment of transference – as she wrote “It would be hard to die like that, he thought; knowing the precise moment. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. To have death steal up on you knowingly, expectantly.  He imagined that all you can do in such circumstance as that would be to deny that it is going to happen; believe that there will be a reprieve – even up to the last second…” you could not escape that fact that in writing it she was in her final days, ok Cancer does not give you quite the exact time and place in the way that the hangman did, but by that stage in the illness, for all intents and purposes, it as unavoidable a death sentence as in the novel.  There is a kind of arrogance almost to continue to write a novel, a long term project, against the backdrop of such a short term future – it is a declaration that you are in charge – that you can out run the hangman?.

Turning to the substance of the narrative; I found DDI Cooper a bit of a cliché, a mixture of Morse and Frost. There were a couple of moments when I could all too readily imagine the second rate TV adaptation, with Cooper and the plucky Policewomen Tring solving every murder under the sun despite the best, and well intentioned but Neanderthal, efforts of the rest of the Met.  But this is to Siân’s credit, it made me cringe exactly because her writing desires better. 

What was most interesting was the way in which Siân inverted the general narrative; this is of World War Two as a period of sacrifice and hardship followed by a great liberation with the coming of peace and the welfare state.  The common bond between the very different lives of Policewomen Tring and Lillian Frobisher was that the war years had been years of freedom and self-fulfillment which were not carried over into the peace.  The old rules were being reapplied but these women were not prepared to take the steps backwards which would have been needed to fit contentedly into old role models. Lillian is by far the strongest character in the novel – and her storyline is the captivating one, the parallel track of the police investigation, while not badly written, is definitely second fiddle, perhaps because it is centered on DDI Cooper rather than Tring.