Synopsis: The Blood- Dimmed Tide, set in 1932, marks the return of the beloved Inspector John Madden, whose discovery of a young girl’s mutilated corpse near his home in rural England brings him out of retirement despite his wife’s misgivings. Soon he finds himself chasing a killer whose horrific crime could have implications far afield in a Europe threatened by the rise of Hitler. A riveting, atmospheric, multilayered mystery, this intense and intelligent tale more than delivers on the promise of Rennie Airth’s first thriller.
The memory of the first John Madden book has also dimmed, so I can’t compare this to that. One thing that gets on my nerves is his wife; she just wants him to be a placid little stay-at-home, farmer type and he is not cut out for that. When a man has to sneak around behind his wife’s back to solve a crime and feel like he’s using his talents to their fullest – Houston, we have a problem. Why should she get to dictate how he lives his life in such a basic area? It’s obvious that he’s in his element when battling wits with a killer, why prevent that? Sure, it’s dangerous, but it’s also dangerous to let this fester until it becomes a marriage-breaker.
With that aside, I liked the police procedural quality of this book. There were some areas that I found suspect – like when someone brought in a forensics team. Were there forensics teams operating in rural England in the 1930s? Doubtful. But the rest of the reasoning and clue-finding rang true. Like the bit about the car and tracing its owner. The obvious suspect turned out not to be the killer, but that person pointed the way to the killer. The fact that the British government covered up years worth of crimes reminded me of the Vatican covering up theirs.
The portrayal of men out of work and the different paths their lives took was also interesting. On the one hand we had the typical vagabond type guy – mostly harmless and willing to put in a little work so he could buy his booze or whatever. At first a couple of these men were suspects, but there wasn’t a huge dragnet type effort made and the cops and citizens both seemed to respect these men’s ways of life. Then there was the more upright individual portrayed by Eddie – he lost his job after returning from the war and would do anything, even very hard labor, to support his family. He was earnest and forthright and I knew he was doomed – he’d either be framed as the killer or murdered by the killer. It was very sad when it turned out to be the latter – it was so final, no room for redemption.
No answers were given for the killer’s motives other than general psychosis or a twisted psyche. His torture of small animals as a child was mentioned and again I wondered if anyone would think of drawing a parallel. As far as I know, this general tendency of young psychopaths wasn’t borne out until the latter half of the 20th century. I’ll have to delve into some of my forensic texts to see if I can pinpoint this or the general accepted use of a CSI team.
Later; I did some cursory checking for this in some of my forensic casework books and found that while some scientific approach was taking place at the time (and even earlier), it was isolated in both technique and locale. Only larger, more publicized cases seem to warrant scientific investigation. Even then, only one or two techniques were used to pinpoint one or two aspects of the crime; identification of the victim seems to be the most prevalent. This leads me to believe that there could have been scientific analysis of this fictional crime at this place and time, but a team of scientists dedicated to solving crims (a CSI team) would have been highly unlikely. But, this is fiction after all so the liberty is not too extreme.
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