The Canal Murders, by J.R. Ellis

Another case of a good cover, name recognition, and good blurb doing its job, leading me to request an ARC.

Beware: copaganda; cancer; death of a child; phonetic spelling to denote old Yorkshire accent/dialect; domestic violence; alcoholism; drug addiction; bisexual character killed.

The Canal Murders, by J.R. Ellis

Last year I read The Body in the Dales, the first in the Yorkshire Murder mystery series, which turned out to be a decent example of a police procedural, even if the characterizations were a bit flat. This book follows pretty much the same pattern, even as the personal circumstances of the returning characters have changed quite a bit in the intervening years.

The setup for the novel goes thusly:

Life moves at a slower pace on the canals. But death always comes when you least expect it.

The last thing DS Stephanie Johnson and DS Andy Carter expected during their much-needed canal holiday was a murder. When retired folk musician Annie Shipton is found stabbed through the neck at the helm of her barge, the couple can’t help investigating the seemingly impossible crime. Nobody else boarded Annie’s boat—so how was she killed from behind?

With the method a perplexing mystery, DCI Oldroyd is summoned from Harrogate, and it’s not long before the detectives have a long list of potential suspects with a motive to want Annie dead. There’s the young cyclist she argued with over access to the towpath, an ambitious and arrogant local developer she clashed with repeatedly, an estranged husband…and more than a few lingering issues with her former bandmates, most of whom live along the canal.

When a second murder sends shockwaves through the community, the locals start talking about a curse on the waterway. It seems the killer will go to any lengths to avoid detection. But can Oldroyd hunt them down before someone else becomes the next target?

The story is narrated from multiple points of view, mostly the four main cops investigating the murders, but also several members of the community who may have had reason to kill Annie Shipton, who was quite the disagreeable character–more on this later.

The novel is divided into a prologue, introducing the setting and the victim, followed by seven chapters; essentially one per day of the investigation. These are broken up in sections as the detectives interview members of the community to determine their potential motives, with some sections from the points of view of the interviewees hinting at hidden connections and other undercurrents.

The tie-ins at the beginning of each chapter are either fragments from the songs the victim’s old band wrote and performed, or bits of local history, or both; there is some exposition on the operation of British canals, given the murder location and method. The book has a solid sense of place.

Not being musically or poetically inclined, I offer no opinion on the quality of the songs attributed to the fictional folk group, which are included in full at the end of the book.

There’s something very quaint about British country policing as portrayed here: at one point, two Detective Constables find three young men and their slightly older dealer doing drugs in the woods near the canal where the murders took place, and rather than arrest them, they “take their details” and tell them to show up at the police station the following day to be given a caution (see footnote ¹). The cops fully expect that the miscreants will, in fact, show up. More quaint is asking the four what their relationships with the victim were, and taking their answers at face value.

Of course, this can be read as part of the misdirection of the narrative, which does a better job at fair play than the first novel in the series; there were in fact a couple of fairly effective red herrings and smaller subplots, even if their resolutions turned out to be more than a bit pat. And while most of the key facts of the crime are on the page, there are gaps not answered until after the guilty party’s confession.

While the characterizations are still more sketch than realized, the author takes pains to make the cops relatable from the first page, expanding upon their professional relationships, as well as their backstories and family lives away from the job; I found it interesting that everyone would quit work at a decent hour. Even after the second murder, there didn’t seem to be much of a sense of urgency, although Oldroyd occasionally gets morose over their lack of progress–which is tonally strange when you realize how quickly they actually solved the murder.

There’s a lot more social commentary in this novel than there was in the first book of the series, including Oldroyd being lectured to by his daughter on prevalent cops attitudes towards intimate partner violence (“just a domestic”) and sexual harassment of female cops, among other things, and how little things have changed over the decades, even with sensitivity training and whatnot.

“We are all culpable. Most people, and I’m one of them, just go along with things as they are because it seems like the norm, and everyone accepts it. It takes a strong person…to come along and say, “Look, this is wrong”. Then you start to see things differently, things that had never occurred before. Most people conform, don’t they? They don’t question things.” (Oldroyd to his daughter Louise, chapter 6)

Even though most of the people in the novel are very white, one of the four detectives is certainly of Indian descent, as is his wife, and much is made of how more accepting of different ethnicities and cultures the country has become in recent years, as compared to oh, the 1960s.

There is also an effort to be inclusive regarding queer people, with an openly lesbian character being readily accepted by the community. On the other hand, the first victim is the only bisexual character mentioned in the book, and she not only cheated on her husband repeatedly, but was essentially a cruel narcissist–the people around her had valid reasons to dislike and resent her.

Then again, most of the hetero marriages and relationships in the book are somewhat antagonistic (a bit à la Midsomer Murders, though generally not as toxic as in that show), and there are frank discussions about domestic violence, as well as how often poverty increases its likelihood.

Aside: much is made of budget cuts and austerity affecting the operation of police departments, which is how the three out-of-town detectives get to play away from their own jurisdiction, as the local cops are short staffed. At the same time, there are enough local cops to send investigative teams all over the place when the four main cops need them.

The ARC has some copy editing issues (a character says something, then the same character responds, and so on), that hopefully were caught before publication; the novel is a solid police procedural that shows growth for both the characters and the writer.

The Canal Murders gets a 7.75 out of 10.

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¹ As I understand it, in English and Welsh law, is when you admit guilt to a minor offense; there’s no sentence, but now you have a record. Obligatory Wikipedia link here.