A Peter Diamond Mystery

Washington Post, April 28, 2013

‘The Tooth Tattoo’ offers fascinating glimpse into string quartets, by way of procedural
By Patrick Anderson

I have no idea how many string quartet aficionados enjoy crime fiction, but they should hasten to read the veteran British writer Peter Lovesey’s fascinating “The Tooth Tattoo.” Strictly speaking, the novel is a police procedural, but the kicker is that the prime suspects in three murders are the members of a world-class string quartet called Staccati.

I hasten to add that readers who, like me, know little or nothing about string quartets (my musical highlight each year is the Birchmere’s Hank Williams tribute) can still savor this ingenious novel.

At the outset, Peter Diamond, who heads the criminal division of the Bath, England, police, is vacationing in Vienna with his elegant friend Paloma. She wants to visit Beethoven’s home, but he’s more interested in seeing highlights — the sewer, the Ferris wheel — of Carol Reed’s Vienna-based 1949 movie classic, “The Third Man.” As they wander, the couple chance upon a flower-strewn memorial to a young Japanese woman who drowned in the Danube a few years earlier. Paloma is moved by the tragedy, but it’s not Diamond’s case, so he’s indifferent. Naturally, she berates him for his alleged inability to express his feelings. “What do you expect?” the detective retorts. “I’m a bloke.”

In this country he’d say, “I’m a guy,” but it’s all the same. So is the outcome: The argument escalates, he stubbornly defends his right to be a guy, and she dumps him.

Soon the drowned woman in Vienna becomes newly relevant when another young Japanese woman is fished out of a canal in Bath — for that is Diamond’s case. He learns that both women loved string quartets, and that Staccati was playing in both Vienna and Bath at about the time they went missing — and possibly were murdered. One of the women had a “tattoo” on her tooth that featured a musical note, although they really aren’t tattoos but small chips that can be glued on. That’s the source of the book’s title, which is the only thing I didn’t like about it.

We soon learn a lot about the four members of Staccati. Ivan, a dour Russian violinist, co-founded the group with a woman called Cat, who is huge (“the girth of a sumo wrestler”), bawdy and a virtuoso on the cello. Andrew, the second violinist, is brilliant musically, although he rarely speaks and is thought by the others to be autistic. Finally, there’s Mel, the newcomer to the group, who plays the viola, chases girls in his spare time and was recruited to replace Harry, who mysteriously vanished after a concert in Budapest. The four argue a lot and have little in common except their love of music, but that’s enough to keep them together.

Lovesey has won many prizes for his crime fiction; we expect fine writing and devilish plots from him. But the wonder of this novel is how deep he carries us into the world of a string quartet. He knows the music, and he makes clear its beauty, its challenges and the passions it arouses in both musicians and their audiences.

One highlight of the novel is a two-page, all but microscopic description of the quartet’s rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 131. Here’s a small sample: “Toward the middle of the first movement the violins speak to each other with the last six notes of the fugue motif and then viola and cello take up the dialogue in one of the loveliest passages in the entire quartet repertoire.”

This novel will probably teach you more than you ever expected to know about string quartets. Did you know that celebrated players often use instruments on loan from wealthy collectors? Mel is using a rare 1625 Amati viola, valued at more than a half-million dollars, and only too late he discovers that there’s no such thing as a free viola.

You’ll learn of their frustrations, too. Cat denounces what she calls the “music merchants,” of whom she says: “They take second-rate artists with pretty faces, groom them, call them the voice or the player of the century, and turn them into stars. .?.?. The quality of the sound is crap, they’re off-key, and the great gullible public doesn’t seem to notice.”

Eventually, the deaths of the two young women are followed by that of someone close to the group. We agonize over whether one of these dedicated musicians could be a killer — or is the culprit an outsider? — but Diamond sorts things out with his usual aplomb. Lovers of good music and a good mystery should not miss this delightful tale.

Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

THE TOOTH TATTOO

By Peter Lovesey

Soho. 348 pp. $25.95

See more information about The Tooth Tattoo here on PeterLovesey.com

[This review originally appeared in the Books section of the Washington Post]

Master Of Moods, Comic And Grim

[This review of Stagestruck by Tom Nolan originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 2, 2011]

Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond, the series character created by British author Peter Lovesey 20 years ago, may not much resemble the rugby player he once was—the belly bulging over his belt sees to that—but he still knows how to bull his way through a workplace scrum. Though he is sensitive about his appearance, you wouldn’t know it from the way he strides “in warlike mode” through his police department in Bath, England, where the other coppers know not to argue with him when he has his “arms folded and jaw jutting in Churchillian defiance.”

Diamond, who has become a widower in the course of the series, is an old-fashioned policeman: impatient with forensic delays, hostile to computers, less than fanatical about the proper handling of evidence. He even quit the force once because he was unable to adapt to change; he was lured back but remained determinedly uninterested in learning new tricks. He knew that he was “no Sherlock Holmes,” but “his self-respect as a detective wouldn’t let him walk away” from a vexing case.

In “Stagestruck” (Soho, 325 pages, $25), the 11th book in the series, the puzzling events in Diamond’s latest investigation begin with the facial burns suffered by a fading pop singer in the first moments of her debut as an actress, on the stage of Bath’s Theatre Royal. A makeup mishap appears to be the cause—but seemingly no crime is involved. Then one of the theater’s crew is found dead backstage, and the case becomes a priority.

It proves a challenging assignment for Diamond: The gruff detective has suffered a lifelong, inexplicable fear of being inside theaters. The phobia began in childhood, but he hasn’t a clue what caused it. His female boss suggests that he see a psychiatrist (“This is in danger of becoming an obsession”); but the investigator takes a more direct approach, tracking down an old teacher who may be able to shine light on a long-ago trauma.

The book’s title thus serves double-duty: Diamond is struck with panic before the proscenium, while victims are struck by real violence backstage.

Mr. Lovesey’s narrative is swift, but he takes time out for local color and abundant humor, the latter springing from the book’s quirky characters, including the matriarch who opens her estate for charity functions (“They come from miles around for a slice of my famous lemon drizzle cake”) and the Gilbert-and-Sullivan-quoting patrolman whose verbal gymnastics—”Permit me to introduce Constable Reed. Reed can write at speed, so Reed is needed. Oh, yes, there is a need for Reed”—drive Diamond to distraction.

The most engaging character, of course, is Diamond himself: always driving slowly “at his usual steady 40” but quick with judgments. He warns a patrolman: “You’ll soon learn that I’m not easy to work for. Whatever you do, it’s wrong.” But a female friend tells him: “I quite enjoy your grouchy moments. You can be amusing and curmudgeonly at the same time.”

Mr. Lovesey is a wizard at mixing character-driven comedy with realistic-to-grim suspense. And in a writing career spanning four decades, he has created a stylish and varied body of work that includes—in addition to nearly a dozen Peter Diamond titles—eight Victorian thrillers with Sergeant Cribb in charge; three Edwardian comedies of manners and mystery; a Hollywood silent-movie-era caper; a 1920s ocean-liner adventure; two novels of life in the English country and city in the 1940s; and four volumes of short stories. Mr. Lovesey’s sports novel, “Goldengirl” (1977)—published under the pseudonym Peter Lear—was made into a movie, and dramatizations of his Sergeant Cribb series were seen in the U.S. on PBS’s “Mystery!” series in the early 1980s.

The first Cribb thriller, “Wobble to Death,” marked Mr. Lovesey’s fiction debut in 1970 and is still a good introduction to the author’s work. Mr. Lovesey, a former English teacher, wrote the book hoping to win a £1,000 fiction-writing prize (he did). The title derives from the name—”wobbles”—given to six-day walking competitions that were held in Britain in the 1880s. The fatal poisoning of a “champion pedestrian” during such an event introduced readers to Sergeant Cribb—40ish, not eccentric but with a sense of humor all his own—and his diligent assistant, Constable Thackeray.

Maybe the best of Mr. Lovesey’s stand-alone books is “The False Inspector Dew” (1982), a tale set in 1921 mostly aboard the ocean liner Mauretania. A henpecked dentist and his girlfriend (who reads too many romances) have booked passage under assumed names, intent on murdering his wife. The complications and coincidences that ensue among a large ensemble cast range from the bizarre to the hilarious, as if in a film directed in alternate sequences by Alfred Hitchcock and Preston Sturges.

That Mr. Lovesey would make a midcareer transition from period fiction to contemporary police investigations is just as surprising as one of the sudden mood shifts in any of his idiosyncratic works—and just as satisfying.

A Peter Diamond Mystery

Battle and burial are built into the history of Lansdown Hill, so it is no great shock when part of a skeleton is unearthed there. But Peter Diamond can’t ignore the fresh corpse found close to the folly known as Beckford’s Tower. The hill becomes the setting for one of the most puzzling cases he has investigated, involving golf, horse racing, Civil War re-enactment and the Cyrillic alphabet. Inevitably, Diamond butts heads with a group of vigilantes who call themselves the Lansdown Society, discovering in the process that his boss Georgina is a member. She resolves to sideline Diamond by sending him to Bristol and handing the skeleton investigation to his deputy, Keith Halliwell. Fortunately matters don’t pan out as Georgina plans …

UK Publisher: Sphere, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-84744-333-5
US Publisher: Soho Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-56947-598-0

“Skeleton Hill, his 10th novel with Inspector Peter Diamond, is absolutely one of the best of this batch. Lovesey’s combination of wit, deduction and great characters is on display in a cunning mystery that would make Agatha Christie envious.” Margaret Cannon (Toronto Globe & Mail)

“A new Peter Diamond mystery is a cause for rejoicing … The man writes flat-out great British police procedurals that play fair and take the reader step by step through the logical process of solving puzzle murders … Peter Lovesey, who has won just about every major mystery award on two continents, is in top form here.” Joseph Scarpato Jr (Mystery Scene)

“Diamond is a classic — better catch him while you can.” Marilyn Stasio (New York Times)

“The excellence of Lovesey’s writing has been highly consistent over the years. When I open a new book by him my expectations are very high and they are always deliciously rewarded. One of the year’s best novels by a master storyteller.” George Easter (Deadly Pleasures)