Fans of the DCI Inspector Banks series will be delighted to learn there’s another volume, the 23rd, in this detective series.
And for those who haven’t been introduced, here’s one.
Set in Yorkshire, these popular and well-crafted police procedurals feature divorced detective Alan Banks, a working-class man who worked in London initially but has spent the last couple of decades in the fictional Yorkshire village of Eastvale. Banks is a sensitive copper with a taste for eclectic music, Laphroaig and solitary evenings.
One of the delights of following this series is following the career and life of Banks as he negotiates parenthood, failed relationships and a rebellious streak that rubs him up the wrong way with his superiors. Banks is surrounded by other police officers, some of them regulars in the series, including DI Annie Cabbot, Winsome Jackson from Jamaica, and others who weave in and through the story and that too is the pleasure of following a crime series: reuniting with the characters who people it. Yorkshire with its dales and hills and flowing streams is as much a character too, and the landscape comes alive in these novels.
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But these are also top-notch crime thrillers and Robinson has his pulse very firmly on the times we live in. Each of the volumes touches on a pertinent and topical issue, and this volume is no exception.
In When the Music’s Over, Banks is now superintendent and his first case involves tackles the issue of sexual abuse by well-known stars who got away with it decades ago, as their victims were simply shamed into silence.
There are two cases in this story, a woman, Linda Palmer, now a successful poet, who was sexually abused by celebrity entertainer Danny Caxton, a man in his eighties living out the last of his celebrity lifestyle on the English coast.
Banks encourages Palmer to keep a notebook, trying to look back at what happened and some of the more moving pieces come from this book, in which Palmer mediates on the notion of memory and its distortions.
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Later on, Banks reflects “how memory transforms rather than presents an accurate snapshot of existence”. The mercurial nature of memory recurs again in the story, a reflection on the refraction of events and how we can come to believe something happened one way and be influenced by it, yet it happened another perhaps.
Running alongside this cold case investigation is that of a 14-year-old who is found naked, beaten, thrown from a moving vehicle, a case that is handed to DI Cabbot. In investigating the case, Cabbot delves into the life of the youngster, who was resident on an estate, her mother a drug addict who keeps seeking help, her stepfather slumped in his chair in his lounge watching the TV.
Robinson probes the squalor and circumstances of these defeated lives, bringing an understanding of these social ills to the story: “This is what becomes of certain people when they feel disenfranchised, get put down and ignored all the time and come to feel there’s no useful way through life for them.” As Banks and Cabbot interview suspects and sift through clues and memories, the strands of the story come together.
Robinson presents a thoughtful, reflective mediation on the zeitgeist of our times through the strands of a crime novel.
Well-crafted as always, Robinson’s writing is fast-paced, yet probing of the times we live in.