I sat down one morning for coffee in the Seaside Village with William McCartney, and as he went for a refill was to drop this in front of me, saying Here's something to read.
Some of us made sourdough during lockdown; William McCartney wrote a crime thriller. If you enjoyed his sardonic travelogues in this newsletter, boy do I have a book for you.
I’d wolfed it down before we were even over Australia’s red bit, and I have not laughed so much or so often in a long time.
It begins in the seaside village of Devonport, but barely long enough for a hangover and then we're whipped through all sorts of North Island scenery that we're invited to see with fresh eyes. What he did so very well for Sofia and Tbilisi, he now does for the Ellerslie car fair, the petrol station at National Park, Seatoun. He observes everything with just that little bit extra acuity and perception; clear-eyed, jaundiced, but still amused and entertained.
As Fat Man talked he drove south, around the Basin Reserve cricket ground, then east through Mount Victoria Tunnel. Wellington is a city of hills and coffee and peninsulas and beer. It's impossible to go far in any direction without finding oneself in a brewery or a tunnel. Out of Mount Victoria and down to Rongotal, where they skirted the northern end of the airport. There was never enough room here for a runway of respectable length, but being the only sizeable piece of flat land near the city, that's where the airport was put: the runway protruding, at its southern end, out to Cook Strait, so that approaching from from that direction was somewhat like landing on an aircraft carrier.
The plot's ingenious. The perceptive, sardonic understanding of the lawyers’ world it inhabits is always apparent. It's also perceptive in warm and touching ways - the mother who keeps checking her phone to hear how her daughter got on at the job interview, for example - while the job interview itself is a piece of character exposition every bit as swift, rich and deft as you would get from Annie Proulx.
But it’s the humour that makes this special.
It's always a delight when someone manages to bottle the lightning and capture the essence of the deadpan way we can speak here: sparing with the words, letting the gaps do the heavy lifting.
A dumbass detective struggles with his idiomatic expressions:
“We can't let him get away with it. We can't give him cut branch"
Macintosh was momentarily quiet. He wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. He blinked.
“What?'
“It's French'
“Is it? Because it sounded quite English"
“It's a translation.”
Courtroom exchanges can sometimes be comedy without a laugh track. When the aforementioned dumbass detective is obliged to read back words he’d once uttered about the judge, in her presence, slowly, piece by hilarious piece, and as counsel takes all the time in the world making an absolute meal of the comic timing, it’s just too good.
This novel is a treat. And don't we all deserve treats right now?
