Published: 2012
You expect a cliché or two when reading a detective novel. The blurb for David Mark’s debut, Dark Winter, tells us that the main character, Detective Sergeant McAvoy, is “a man with a troubled past... his unwavering belief in truth and justice has made him an outsider in the police force he serves” (seriously, it really does). So, turning back to a genre I haven’t indulged in for years, I was expecting some inevitable, yet comfortingly familiar clichés. And yes, there are a few of them in this book, but in some ways the character of DS McAvoy isn’t one of them. Entering an already crowded marketplace, Mark has at least brought a few new elements to the table.
There’s an established archetype for the protagonist in a modern-day detective story these days: the grizzled, bitter maverick. Morally complex, he puts all his energy and time into being a workaholic to distract from a troubled past or non-existent private life. In DS McAvoy, then, David Mark provides us with a new breed of detective. He has a loving, happy marriage and a young child; he doesn’t drink, smoke or have any other vices (apart from the occasional guilt-wracked pop and chocolate binge on a park bench); he may work for the Serious and Organised Crime division, but is apparently happier designing new computer matrixes than doing the dirty work catching criminals. Keeping his head down. Or so it seems at first.
Hull - Mark’s adopted hometown – is the setting for this crime thriller. It isn’t the first place I’d expect a story like this to be set, but it is every bit as gritty as Rebus’s Edinburgh. Hull is “a people in decline, a city on its arse”, a place where our current economic woes are merely the latest bad news in thirty years of misery. Images of decline pervade the novel: down-at-heel drinking holes on otherwise boarded up streets; council estates abandoned save for a few final residents. The sense of place Mark creates is one of its strengths.
The depressing locale is the least of DS McAvoy’s problems. He has made some enemies in the police force in recent years, having exposed the wrongdoings of a corrupt but popular senior officer, and now the force is deeply divided. Then, in the run-up to Christmas, a teenage girl is brutally stabbed to death in a church in a manner strangely reminiscent of a death she escaped years earlier, as a child in war-torn Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, a retired trawlerman is found dead in a lifeboat, apparently having pitched himself over the side of a container ship, in the same stretch of water where, back in the ‘sixties, he was the sole survivor of a sunken fishing boat. McAvoy is the only one who can see a connection between the two: someone is doing away with people who appear to have cheated death – and, with the rest of the force dithering around hopelessly, there are going to be more murders before Christmas Eve rolls around.
It must be said there are some evident flaws in this book – some readers (not me, I have to admit) solved the question of the killer’s identity from his first incongruous appearance. There’s a few dubious plot elements as well: a scene in which the killer escapes from a freight container on a ship, having shut himself in with a cutting torch prior to the voyage seems a little farfetched, I’d imagine those things are so tightly packed in that this would be practically impossible (not to mention subsequently returning unnoticed from Iceland, dressed entirely in black). For me, another downside (perhaps thanks to the likes of Mr Rankin) was that McAvoy is just too nice, too goody-goody and pious, to be that engaging a character. Despite these criticisms, I have to say it was a real page turner – I burned through it in about a day. And it is his first book, too – it will be interesting to see how his style matures in future works (he has already announced that Dark Winter is the first in a series).
The detective / murder mystery genre remains popular for any number of reasons. David Mark, a former crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post, probably understands these better than most: amid the mindless horror of real crime reports, fiction gives a reassuring sense of purpose and motive of the killer – i.e. if we can understand the perpetrator’s motivation, their philosophy, they can be stopped. As a journalist, you can imagine that he must at some point have wished real life fitted together that neatly.
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