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Overall, a very self-aware novel with vivid characters and an interesting take on true crime as a genre - I would highly recommend getting this on your 'to be read' list for next year! The writing style is odd and simplistic, but not calculatedly so. It reminded me of the narration of Edgar Lustgarten's Scotland Yard true crime series shown on British TV years ago, a sort of flat pseudojournalese . The plot, concerning the murder of a bookman, also manages to drag in witchcraft, spiritualism and psychology, all very unconvincing and dull. While this is no Agatha Christie, like the Christie mysteries, it offers several possible suspects right up to the end. I admit this was not an especially exciting read, but it wasn’t all bad either.
Almost everyone comes under suspicion and almost anyone could have committed the crime. By the time I reached the end, I really did not much care who the murderer was. Wigan learns of the collaborator's death only when in the end the killer confesses to the second crime (which he does spontaneously, in fact Wigan only investigates the first murder), inconceivable!
We chat with Alice Slater about her fierce, grimy debut Death of a Bookseller and the legacy of true crime in fiction and beyond
Alice Slater also does such an incredible job at balancing the serious and imperative with the humorous commentary. The book in its entirety is both unsettling, focusing on true crime, real cases, statistics and conversations on Roach's fascination with serial killers, as-well as hilarious and full of bookselling jokes and knowledge. It made for both a deeply humorous yet deeply compelling read! The PERFECT amount of fun! When she arrives in Roaches failing bookstore, tasked with bringing life into the dying business, she brings a sense of light with her that's unfamiliar but intriguing. But in that light, Roach sees a little glimmer of dark - something she can connect with and soon she is obsessed with finding the broken parts of Laura, making her realise they'd be best friends ... If only Laura would look at her. I appreciated the incisive introduction by Martin Edwards. He places the book in its time and explains its place in the genre of classic crime.
The rare book business is shown as home to all kinds of skulduggery and disreputable people, some truly loving the books but others simply seeing them as a way to make money from gullible collectors. Farmer shows us all levels, from the man selling books from a barrow, to the large traders selling from shops and catalogues, to the American millionaire, willing to pay any price or break any law so that his library will be better than anyone else’s. Farmer makes a few comments that suggest he may not have been pleased at so many rare British books making their way into American collections, and also hints a little sniffily that some collectors never read the books they display so proudly. It all felt very authentic to me, written by a man who clearly knew what he was talking about. And there’s lots of enjoyable references to specific rare first editions, and an indication of how authors rise and fall in the fashionable stakes of the collectibles market, sometimes on something as simple as a new film or TV adaptation of one of their books. The development of the two main characters - Roach and Laura - was fabulous. Roach is obviously meant to be the weird one, the one we should be wary of. But at first, I didn’t see her like that. Yes she was odd and weird and obsessive and creepy, but I was finding myself liking her. Whereas I didn’t like Laura at first. I felt she was this Miss know-it-all and instantly rated. However, as it went along Roach became more uncomfortable and Laura became familiar. Roach began to cross many lines and you’re conflicted as to whether you can root for her or not. But in the end, I felt I couldn’t support her. Whilst I still enjoyed her uniqueness, I found it hard to justify what she was doing. Excellent development on both parts. At the end of the book, Roach gets away with everything. Nothing happens to her. And Laura? The victim? She is seen as the person who went crazy and caused all this drama. That everything was always in her head. I have never hated a book from beggining, middle, end, as much as I did this one.
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The story revolves around Sergeant Wigan, a policeman by vocation but also a bibliophile who is discovering the joys of tracing and buying first editions. When one of his book selling friends is found murdered with a very costly first edition missing from his shelves, Wigan is temporarily attached to the team investigating the murder. An honest policeman, Sergeant Wigan, escorts a drunk man home one night to keep him out of trouble and, seeing his fine book collection, slowly falls in to the gentle art of book collecting. Just as the friendship is blossoming, the policeman's book-collecting friend is murdered. Alice Slater has penned a brilliant book, I hope it’s wildly successful. It’s definitely an obsession. I hope the author has more books planned. We read their story from both POV’s, and the similarity between their stories becomes gradually known. Another similarity is the fact that they both drink. A lot. An awful lot. Why in heavens’ name would you spend almost every evening after work getting drunk with your colleagues? Every character in this story – because there are more people working in Spines, the store where the story is set – is on his/her way to become a full fledged alcoholic. If you cannot call them that already.
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