Killer dilemma

BY FREDERIC LINDSAY

Allison & Busby, 240pp, 18.99

BARCLAY CURLE IS A crime novelist, quite successful, but not a bestseller, and currently stuck on his new book.

He is also a guilty man. For eight years now he has been unfaithful to his wife, managing however to keep his affair secret - not an easy thing in Edinburgh, where he lives. But on his young son's face he catches "the faintly anxious look common to the sons and daughters of the unhappily married".

Soon worse things are happening to him. Someone is sending him anonymous letters, with reference to the serial murderer who had featured in his last three novels. This is disturbing. Then one day his agent reintroduces him to a man he hasn't seen since schooldays; a man, Brian Todd, who back then had bullied him horribly, making his life a misery for 18 months. Todd now seems friendly, even effusively so, but his determination to get close to Curle seems in some obscure way threatening.

Meanwhile Curle's relationship with his mistress is becoming edgy and is in danger of being revealed: calling on her unexpectedly one afternoon, Curle finds a young man there who works in a bookshop, and therefore is likely to recognise him and wonder why he has given a false name.

And then there is a murder.

To Detective-Inspector Jim Meldrum, the central character in five of Lindsay's previous novels, Curle seems the obvious suspect. His sidekick, DC McGuigan, is convinced of his guilt. Yet Meldrum makes no move. Is he giving Curle sufficient rope to hang himself?

Lindsay's other Jim Meldrum novels may be described as police procedurals, like Ian Rankin's Rebus stories. Meldrum is not only the central character, but the plot unfolds as he sees it. This one is different. There is next to no police work, or rather next to no account of police work. Most of the action is as seen and experienced by Curle. It is a whodunit, in as much as the novel can't be resolved until the murderer is revealed, but in essence it is a psychological crime novel.

Though Curle gets no further from Edinburgh than Peebles, he is in his own mind a man on the run, for whom everything is in danger of falling apart. He is a hunted man, but he is also a hunter, for only by following his own line of investigation can he hope to begin to repair his marriage and his life; only by doing so can he rid himself of what he comes to feel more and more as the oppressive menace of the schoolboy bully who has forced his way back into his consciousness.

I have never understood why Frederic Lindsay hasn't taken off as Ian Rankin and Christopher Birkmyre and Paul Johnston have. Admittedly, his novels don't have the scope of Rankin's; you don't get the sense of the city or the social range of a Rankin book. But I suspect the real reason is that Lindsay's novels are not plot-driven. He gives the impression of being more concerned with character than with narrative. It is Curle's dilemma that interests him here. Moreover, Lindsay is neither a comfortable nor a comforting writer.

He gives you people coming to the end of their tether; there's an echo of Simenon in his best work, and I can't offer praise higher than that. Here, the working out of the plot is perfunctory. It's the story of Curle and his marriage that matters, not the murderer's identity.

No doubt this is considered a weakness in a crime novel, yet The Endings Man is a book that will stay with you long after most police procedurals have been forgotten.