The Shadows and the Dust by Allan Gaw review: 'a heck of a lot of backstory'

Many people seem to like Allan Gaw’s novels, but I should confess at the outset that this was the first by him I had read. It might be that if I had been an early adopter the narrative would have more punch. There are three previous novels, and so there is backstory, which Gaw fills in very well: you don’t need to have read the previous books to “jump in” as it were. So we have Dr Jack Cuthbert, who ticks the boxes for historical crime. He is brilliant, damaged, has a quirk (he is gay in the 1930s), fiendishly handsome and the previous war hangs over him. At the outset of the new novel, he is happily in love, and his housekeeper Madame Smith is both remarkably tolerant and still enigmatic. It feels almost like a filler episode of a book, since there are no real revelations, but a heck of a lot of backstory.

Allan Gaw photographed for The Scotsman by Lisa Ferguson

The present moment involves the discovery of a child’s body in the grounds outwith a convent and orphanage. There are soon more found. Nuns and child corpses is a quite obvious piece of misdirection, and it actually revolves around suicide. Of course, it is not permitted to reveal the culprit, but as I have found the Midsomer Solution usually works: choose the least likely. It is pretty obvious from page 70 who the killer is. But it was around page 70 that I found myself struggling.

“But he had a job to do”. “It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you”. “I wasn’t sure if my eyes had been playing tricks”. “The very idea of it sends a shiver through me”. “Not getting any younger”. “No rest for the wicked”. This seems to me a concatenation of clichés. There is nothing wrong is some ways with clichés, since the reason they persist is that they are convenient. But if the reader begins to notice the number of them, it becomes problematic. In a similar fashion there are pieces of dialogue which, to be honest, I do not think anyone ever spoke, even in the 1930s. There is a use of names – on one page alone “Dr Morgenthal, I think it’s time for a tutorial” and then a few lines down “Dr Morgenthal, why do we call it toxicology?” – which seems awfully like amateur dramatics to me.

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Perhaps for those who are already acquainted with Dr Cuthbert the passages concerning his private schooling will be more resonant. The issue of his sexuality is handled with more kindness than one might have expected, although it runs the risk of anachronism. Cuthbert of course is also an excellent rugby player, and the erotics of scrums and changing rooms is not exactly subtle.

The role of specialism in crime fiction is a delicate balancing act. Gaw is detailed but not lurid – certainly less visceral than, say, the Kay Scarpetta books by Patricia Cornwell. It is necessary to convince but not bore the reader, and it works fairly well here, though there are longeurs in the “info dumps”; a tendency to tell a lot but show less. In crime novels there are two kinds of solutions. On one hand, we have the old journalistic adage of the who, what, where, when, how; but there is also the moralistic why. The psychology of the perpetrator is as important in crafting a work as the mechanics of the deed. Here – without giving anything away – there is a strange conflation of trauma and bitterness. Some of the psychology is almost gauche: “Anyone who could kill a child, in his opinion, had to have a mind that was no longer working normally. Such extreme aberrant behaviour was surely symptomatic of dysfunction.”

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Given the setting, there is a great deal said about sin rather than crime. “What sin had he and his wife committed that this was their punishment, a life without children?” muses the sidekick detective Baker. Elsewhere, there are reflections on whether suicide is a sin or an act of moral desperation. Cuthbert, in his younger self, is vexed by whether his inclinations are sinful. There is a laudable sense of liberalism, except when it comes to the nuns. Although one character has a reason to dislike them especially, the narrative as a whole seems to belittle them as mendacious and puritanical. Grace does not extend into the convent.

There is a kind of externality to much of the book. In describing the younger Cuthbert, Gaw writes “He was an intelligent child, and he had long surpassed her [his nanny] both in reading and understanding what he read”. This is otiose, given we had ample evidence in this book alone, and presumably the previous ones, that Cuthbert is intelligent.

One of the ironies for me of reading historical crime is actually wanting to go back to the crime novels of the period. I picked up an old Ngaio Marsh just after reading this, and it seemed far more modern than Gaw’s book. Ideas of repression and decency were just as evident then, but what struck me most was there was a sense of jeopardy, and it might be interesting for this series if Cuthbert was actually imperilled.

The Shadows and the Dust, by Allan Gaw, Polygon, £9.99

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