Scotland Yard

I finished Racing The Devil, an Ian Rutledge story set in and around Birling Gap, west of Eastbourne.

All in all, an okay Ian Rutledge novel. I thought it was unnecessarily strung out by about a third.

And although the conclusion makes sense when all the facts were in, it wasn’t a particularly satisfying conclusion. It came too much out of nowhere.

But at the very least, it was a nice tour around southern England, including The Seven Sisters chalk cliffs.



One thing I like about the Ian Rutledge novels is the realism. And I think that’s where this one suffers. The premise is forced. The body count become such that it strains credibility. A central character isn’t forthcoming with vital information even though there is no reason for him to withhold it. A child, Gem, is a huge McGuffin thrown into this who otherwise might have been a charming character. But they try to do too much with her.

It’s thus a bit of a patchwork effort. And as with other Rutledge novels, the writers run out of anything new to say so you basically get a plot that sort of repeats itself. If one man can be run down by an auto, why not another? And another? And another?

The best part of this novel is setting you in the time and place, as well as coming along for the ride with the steady Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard. An Amazon reviewer catches this aspect nicely:



There are one or two other interesting characters (the Rector’s loyal housekeeper, for one) that add a touch of charm and realism. But such characters tend to be few and far between. I didn’t generally find the characters “rich” but instead they seemed more like convenient placeholders,

Your impression is correct. This series was on PBS several years back. Suffice it to say that Banks is a complete wimp.  He acts like a fifteen-year-old boy, mopey, depressed, surly and boring.  

DCI Banks is not worth the time it takes to turn on the TV.

The Black Ascot turned out to be one of the better Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard novels by Charles Todd.

I still think the plots of these books (typical of the genre) are needlessly convoluted. The resolving of the mystery is by no means particularly satisfying. And I would say that for every 100 pages written that about only 75 are needed.

That is, what could have been a gripping long novella or short novel is needlessly padded into something that waters down those parts of the book that are good.

And, again for one of these books, the title of the book (The Black Ascot) describes an event (some kind of cross-county tour/race) that only marginally intersects on the story — a thin excuse to have one.

But someone (maybe more than one) is murdered, and Ian Rutledge is charged with taking a look at an old, unresolved case. The book starts very well (as described in an earlier post) and generally is interesting throughout, mostly (but not entirely) avoiding the quicksand of plot extensions and needless iterations of the same idea over and over again, presumably just to increase the page count.

There is, more or less, an arc to the story that makes sense although much of the plot still has that air of being unnatural and a bit tacked-on. Such is the genre, of course. One Amazon reviewer said it best:



Nothing really busts through this story to announce itself as “stupid” until one event over halfway into the novel. (Spoiler alert, but it will make almost zero difference in enjoying the novel, which is a statement of the stupidity of the plot element.) Having knocked on a lot of doors and upset a whole bunch of people, someone knocks on Ian Rutledge’s door. Rutledge opens the door. Blam. Lights out. He’s shot.

Fair enough, I suppose, although it seems strange at the time that Rutledge is so incautious. Be that as it may, that’s only a small blip compared to the mountain of stupidity that follows. Whoever shot him wasn’t a good shot. The bullet grazes Rutledge’s head, but still does knock him unconscious and he requires a brief hospital stay. But the automatic assumption by everyone, including Rutledge (who can’t remember what happened), is that he tried to commit suicide — on his front doorstep, in broad daylight.

No one takes note of this. No one takes note that Rutledge had been traveling around the south of England asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions (regarding an unsolved murder, no less) and stirring up a bit of trouble. No one asks whether or not Rutledge might have compelled the murderer to try to cover his tracks by taking out the inspector. No, everyone automatically assumes Rutledge tried to off himself even though he was giving no signs before then of anything but a steady Scotland Yard detective.

Still, that’s about all the criticism. If I read an average detective novel out there, I could write a hundred pages on the faults of such books that might begin to approach the length of the books themselves. The main draw of these Todd novels is Ian Rutledge and the time period he is in. But the excuse to have a story is often thin. The characters are often equally thin. The plot itself a bit dashed out. But what the hell, it’s better than 90% of the crap out there.

Hopefully my caveats are ironclad so that when you read these, you'll not encounter any surprises.

There's also a series they've done about a nurse. Given how thin I thought Michael Connelly's novels were when he tried to affirmative-action a female into a lead role (one was passable...because Bosch was central to it), I don't have high hope for these nurse books. But you never know.

It’s funny. Search in the Dark was a complete bust. It represented the worst excesses of the authors. Within twenty pages I felt the urge to start skipping. And soon after I actually began to skip (looking for the story to move forward). But it was just composed of the endless nothingness of Inspector Rutledge turning over in his mind what could have happened.

This kind of speculation is excessive even in the better novels. And, sure, one could suppose on general principals that the novel could get better, and so stick with it. But these Charles Todd novels have always tended the other way, starting out well enough and then bogging down. And bogging down precisely because the authors couldn’t be bothered to move the story along and instead involved the reader in the dull exercise of Rutledge endlessly turning over in his mind what might have happened — instead of following the inspector as he goes out in the world and tries to found out what actually did happen.

These books will never be mistaken for art. But some of them are decent enough time-wasters. But when you come across such parched artlessness, it makes you realize that sometimes the authors are just churning out words to meet a quota. Nothing more. I would have been really pissed if I had paid for it. But I got it from the online library as usual. Steer clear of this one.

Not having found much worth reading, I've returned to an Ian Rutledge novel: A Lonely Death. I'm going to try to bite the bullet and slog my way through this. So far it's okay.

That plot rings a bell. I wonder if that was made into a live action in the series with Joan Hickson?