Book review: A Question of Identity by Susan Hill

Murder in real life remains shocking and horrible, and has consequences that go beyond the question of its detection. It is easy to forget this since murder for our entertainment is so common in novels and films and television programmes.

A Question of Identity by Susan Hill

Chatto & Windus, 364pp, £16.99

One of the many virtues of Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler crime novels, of which this is the seventh, is that she never allows us to forget the awful reality of murder. She may, like all the best writers of crime fiction, take pleasure in her ingenuity, and evident relish in devising the macabre circumstances of a death, but the victims in her novels are not mere conveniences whose death is necessary to set the plot in motion. Moreover, she reminds us that murder does not exist in a vacuum. It affects, even disrupts, society.

At the same time, no matter how terrible the crime, other people’s lives – even the lives of those charged with its investigation – go on. They have their own private concerns, their pleasures and problems. This means that these books are social novels as well as crime ones. People have absorbing and distracting relationships; they have children who are proving difficult. Even her murderer may have a family; she raises the possibility that his or hers may even be a happy one.

In this book, as in The Various Haunts of Men, she gives a voice to her murderer, long before we know who he is. There are short italicised first-person chapters in which we enter into his mind. Actually it is not quite accurate to say “before we know who he is”; more accurate to say we have no doubt as to who he was. What we don’t know is who he has become. There is a murder trial in the first chapter, set in Yorkshire in 2002, The man in the dock, Alan Keyes, is accused of killing three old women. The method is the same in all cases. He enters their house at night, strangles them, and sits them in front of a mirror. He then clips their toe-nails. Everyone, including his wife, is certain he will be found guilty.The defence casts doubt on some of the evidence. The jury acquits him. The public fury is such that, for his future safety, he is given a new identity. Alan Keyes no longer exists.

Ten years later, in Lafferton, the fictional town that is the setting for all the Serrailler novels, an old woman is killed in the same way in a new sheltered housing development, the Duchess of Cornwall Close. Though it takes time for the connection to the previous case to be made, Serrailler is immediately certain that this will prove to be the work of a serial killer. (This is not intuition; the circumstances of the murder point to the probability.) Another killing soon follows, and then, somewhat surprisingly, a third – surprisingly because it doesn’t fit the pattern. But even when the link to the Yorkshire murders is established, the question remains: who has Alan Keyes become?

This is the crime part of the novel, and it is very good. But, as in all these books, we are also engaged in the continuing story of the Serrailler family: Simon’s relationship with the woman Rachel he met and fell in love with in the previous book, a woman married to an older, incapacitated husband; his widowed sister Cat’s difficulties with her children, especially her son Sam, now a teenager; Cat’s work as a doctor, no longer a GP, but the medical director of a hospice which is in financial difficulties; their chilly father’s second marriage to a woman they both like, a marriage that shows signs of being in trouble.

All this gives the novel a much richer texture than is usual in crime fiction. And there are questions which, if they are to be answered, must wait until the next novel.

Near the end of this book, Cat wonders: “How did you tell your policeman brother about a crime, of which you have no actual proof, but which you know in conscience you ought to report?”

One of the reasons why these novels are so much better than the common run of crime fiction is that the characters are confronted by moral or ethical questions which, on the face of it, have no connection with the murder or murders that the police have to solve, but which nevertheless are contingent to them.

Hill makes us see that the crimes which attract the attention of the police are only one example, or perhaps, an extension of what Nicholas Freeling called “the pathology of the human condition, the moment after, it may be, a long drawn-out disturbance or perversion, at which the delicate balance of metabolism tilts into morbidity.”

In focussing our attention on this she makes the novel of detection more than entertainment. She writes as an honest and disturbing witness to our times.