Book review: Jeremiah’s Bell, by Denzil Meyrick

The observation that familiarity breeds contempt is as old as the hills, or at least as old as Aesop’s Fables. Doubtless it is often true enough, but familiarity also offers comfort, and, where crime fiction is concerned, brings sales. At least since Conan Doyle sent Holmes and Watson to work, crime novelists have recognised that sticking with the same detective or policeman is a way of promoting brand loyalty. Jeremiah’s Bell is Denzil Meyrick’s seventh novel to feature DCI Jim Daley, and more than a million copies of the series have been sold. There is familiarity of place as well as of characters. The Daley novels are set on the Mull of Kintyre in Meyrick’s home county, Argyll, and in the town of Kinloch, which I take to be Campbeltown.

The new novel is a rich broth. Daley, returning to work after suspension and a breakdown, still suffers nightmares. His marriage is fragile and he relies on his best friend Brian, now perforce teetotal. A rich American woman, Alice, arrives in the town which she left in mysterious circumstances as a teenager. There is a connection to a strange family, the Doigs, living on a fairly remote strip of the coast: two elderly parents and three hefty middle-aged sons with learning difficulties. The family has had a bad reputation for generations, suspected of having been engaged in the crime of “wrecking” – luring ships and boats on to the rocks, murdering survivors and pillaging. (There is a flashback to 1925 and a connection with whisky-running in the Prohibition years in the USA). There are rumours of wealth despite the miserable condition in which they live, and there is another connection to an Edinburgh firm, one of its partners being the identikit bent and greedy lawyer of today’s Scottish crime fiction. There is soon a death and then it seems Alice is in danger. Meanwhile there is an agreeable couthy sub-plot concerning the fate of the town’s County Hotel, while the case of the Doigs’ sons will prove truly horrifying. Finally, Meyrick provides us with a fine twist in the tail, justified, as such twists often aren’t, by the subtlety of his misdirection: now you don’t see it, now you do.

Meyrick has a brisk narrative style, rapid but not too rapid, for he takes time to anchor the improbabilities of his narrative in everyday normality. There is comedy too in episodes featuring an elderly American mobster recruited from retirement to do a final job which will (he hopes) provide for his last years. Add to this some good atmospheric writing and, as I say, moments of chilling horror, and you have a fine example of tartan noir, superior to most of the genre.

That said, it also has the faults of the genre. Credibility is stretched to breaking-point and perhaps, for critical readers, beyond it. More importantly, though the complicated plots is well-engineered, death itself is diminished. There are too many killings and so each of them becomes insignificant. In this respect tartan noir is like the hard-boiled American crime novel. None of it matters – it’s only entertainment.

Crime novelists, it’s fair to say, always have this problem: how to combine entertainment with significance. Murder has consequences and these are serious, destructive and metaphysical. Meyrick recognises this, hence Daley’s near-breakdown. Yet in the quickening of action and the proliferation of killings, reality and the nature of murder are pushed into the wings, and the last stages of the narrative become merely grotesque. Consequently the suspension of disbelief which fiction demands becomes impossible. This is why so many crime novels collapse before they end.

Jeremiah’s Bell is very enjoyable. As entertainment and diversion it ranks highly. It gallops along and there are fine sinister and disturbing moments, so it may be accounted a success and one which will please readers who look only for immediate enjoyment from a novel and are happy to let improbabilities pass unquestioned. But the best writers of crime fiction – here in Scotland, Ian Rankin and Denise Mina – provide more than that, and if ultimately this novel leaves some unsatisfied, it will be because Meyrick seems capable of something darker, richer and more serious than is evident here.

Jeremiah’s Bell, by Denzil Meyrick, Polygon, 431pp, £8.99

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