A British invasion: Two top crime writers in the U.K. cross the pond

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Sometimes it seems like England gets all the good stuff first: the Beatles, the Mini Cooper, "The Kumars at No. 42" . . . and, of course, some of the best mystery and thriller writers, including John Harvey, Simon Beckett and Nicci French. This summer, two more of Britain's top suspense novelists are being introduced on U.S. shores.

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Shortly after being offered the assignment of reviewing Meg Gardiner's latest book, The Dirty Secrets Club, I was visiting an American friend in Tokyo and discovered the first Gardiner book, China Lake, on his bookshelf. The novel was a veritable roller coaster ride from page one. The protagonist, Evan Delaney, neatly splits the difference between Sue Grafton's feisty Kinsey Millhone and Robert Eversz's edgy Nina Zero. I finished it in short order, and was left eager to read The Dirty Secrets Club. Although her novels are set in her native California, Gardiner makes her home in England, and until now her books have been largely unavailable stateside. As Gardiner explained in our email interview, "The novels have been out in the rest of the English-speaking world since 2002, but weren't on sale in the USA. Then luck intervened, loudly"—Stephen King wrote a column praising Gardiner's books in Entertainment Weekly. The next week, "10 American publishers wanted to publish the Evan Delaney series, along with The Dirty Secrets Club," says Gardiner. "I was blown away." American readers will now have the chance to experience one of the finest contemporary writers in the genre.

The streets of San Francisco provide the backdrop for the fast-paced The Dirty Secrets Club. Membership is limited to the rich, famous and influential, to ensure that each person would have lots to lose if their secret were to be exposed. The problem is that one by one, the dirty secrets are coming to light, and the ensuing rash of high-profile suicides plagues the City by the Bay: first a highly regarded prosecutor launches her BMW off a freeway ramp; then a 49ers football star takes a flying dive off the Golden Gate Bridge. Enter Jo Beckett, forensic psychiatrist, and Amy Tang, hard-bitten SFPD policewoman, to try to make sense of it all. The interplay between Beckett and Tang is at once tentative and aggressive, neither one entirely trusting the motivations of the other. And Beckett has a secret of her own that she desperately wants to keep to herself.

Gardiner's characters are tough, but always sympathetic. "I figure that if I'm going to spend a year with these people while I write a novel, I'd better be able to stand their company. Even the awful characters had better have some redeeming features," she says. For my part, I will add a small amount to Gardiner's coffers by buying all of the Delaney books as soon as they are available—China Lake and Mission Canyon are already on sale, and the sequels will be released over the next three months.


Author Photo Our next English import, novelist Martina Cole, has rarely been off U.K. bestseller lists for some 17 years now. I had the opportunity to talk on the phone with Cole recently, and her quick wit and street smarts were evident in every response. When her first book, Dangerous Lady, was published, she received the requisite large check from her publisher. I asked her what she did for a first-time splurge: "Well, my accountant told me if I wanted to buy a new car, I needed to do it quickly; it had something to do with English tax law and saving buckets of money. I was painting my bedroom, and had paint all over me, and I went to the BMW dealer that way. The salesman couldn't be bothered with me until I told him that I wanted to buy a new BMW and pay cash for it. I think he nearly fainted!" With the royalties from successive books she has bought a country home that dates back to Elizabethan times ("It has a resident ghost") a garage full of lovely automobiles and a motorboat ("No sailboats for me; I'm a power boat girl.").

It was not always the high life for Martina Cole. She grew up in a working-class family; at times she had to hold down three jobs at once just to make ends meet. Nowadays, that's not a problem, of course, as her books have hit the bestseller lists all over the world, and she is poised to do just that stateside as well with her newly released American debut, Close. Like Cole's previous books, Close is a tale of the London underground, gritty and harsh, not for the weak of heart (or stomach). It is a milieu with which Cole is very familiar, the hardscrabble turf of a poor urban neighborhood, where "the Wall of Silence" prevailed, and folks turned a blind eye to the violent crimes happening all around them with startling regularity. This ambitious novel spans a 40-year period in the life of Clan Brodie, a notorious London crime family, starting in the swinging '60s and moving forward to the present. Think "The Sopranos" with a Cockney accent, and you would not be far off. And like "The Sopranos," it is brutally hard-hitting, superbly crafted and deserving of a rabid fan base in America, as well as the rest of the world.


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