The Killer Next Door. By Alex
Marwood. Penguin. $16.
The Wicked Girls. By Alex
Marwood. Penguin. $16.
Really good crime writers do
not need to set their novels in an isolated, brooding castle or on a remote
island, nor do they require twisted-looking, visibly demented characters either
as killers or as red herrings. What they do, what makes their books truly
frightening, is to set stories in everyday surroundings and people them with
characters so ordinary that even the notion that one of them may perpetrate
great evil is chilling. In other words, to quote Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase
in a different context, writers such as Alex Marwood explore “the banality of
evil,” and their books are all the more frightening as a result.
Marwood is the pseudonym of
British author Serena Mackesy, who wrote four books under her real name – The Temp, Virtue, Simply Heaven and Hold My Hand – before turning to intense
crime fiction with The Wicked Girls,
published in 2012 and now available in paperback. Mackesy/Marwood is, like her
settings, mundane on the face of things: a fiftysomething sometime journalist
who taught English for a while and even did some door-to-door selling. Her
father was a military historian and both her grandmothers were authors, but
there is nothing specific in her background that would seem to connect her with
the gritty, realistic and thoroughly ominous settings in which The Wicked Girls and her new book, The Killer Next Door, take place.
The Wicked Girls is a story about a horrible crime that, in a
sense, simply happened. The book’s impact comes from the fact that the perpetrators,
11-year-olds named Jade Walker and Annabel (Bel) Oldacre, who are responsible
for the death of a four-year-old named Chloe Francis, are themselves victims of
social-class expectations and their childhood environment – and may or may not
be able to escape those forces as adults. Narratively set 25 years after the
crime, featuring the girls of the title as grown women with new names – Jade is
now Kirsty Lindsay and Bel has become Amber Gordon – the book seesaws between
present and past, revealing details of the original crime bit by bit as Kirsty,
now a journalist, looks into a series of attacks on young women in the seaside
town of Whitmouth. Kirsty’s work brings her into contact with Amber for the
first time in 25 years, after Amber discovers a dead body at Funnland, the
amusement park where she works. Aside from the obvious irony of the place’s
name, it is very well-chosen for the events of the book: like clowns, intended
to bring enjoyment but frequently seeming downright creepy, amusement parks –
with their prepackaged rides, modest thrills and general air of seediness – have
something vaguely disturbing about them, and it is this undercurrent of things
being not quite right that Marwood explores and exploits with considerable
skill. Amusement parks are, by definition, crowded, and much of The Wicked Girls deals with the scary
aspects of crowds – not only the physically scary ones but also those derived
from the tendency of crowds to change subtly, almost imperceptibly, into mobs,
motivated by a strange sort of groupthink that prejudges, interprets reality
based on those prejudgments, and then acts as if that imagined reality is
identical with truth. The Wicked Girls,
which won an Edgar Award, has its expected share of twists and turns – it would
not be in the murder-mystery/psychological-thriller genre if it did not – but
it also has something more: compelling, carefully limned characters who are
just ordinary enough so it is easy to imagine living next door to them, totally
unaware not only of their past lives but also of their past and current
potential for good and evil. The very mundanity of the settings is what makes
them most ominous: like the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Robert Bloch book on
which the movie is based, Funnland and Whitmouth are just real enough to make
readers look over their figurative shoulders while reading about what happens
there. You never really know, do you, just who lives next door or down the
block? If you think you know, based
on what you have been told, you can never be quite sure that anyone’s stated
biography is true, can you? Thinking too much about this invites paranoia, and
that is just what The Wicked Girls
produces: a feeling that there are depths in ordinary people that it is not
wise to explore too thoroughly, depths from which monsters can spring.
The identical underlying
theme is explored from another angle in The
Killer Next Door, an otherwise very different mystery set not in a creepy
seaside amusement park but in an ordinary urban rooming house. The book’s structure
is a well-worn one: a group of people, thrown together by circumstance but
otherwise unrelated, bonds because of something horrible that happens – and
then the bond starts to sever as people realize that someone in the group
perpetrated the gory crime (and it is
gory, possibly too much so for some readers). The rundown rooming house where
the book is set – think Bates Motel again – stands for the anonymity of big
cities everywhere, although Marwood skillfully turns the story into a
specific-to-London tale through careful scene painting (indeed, U.S readers
should be prepared, here as in The Wicked
Girls, to look up some of the British references and vocabulary with which
both books are packed). The building’s residents could easily descend into
cardboard types, and a couple of them do, but by and large they are
well-developed enough so readers will genuinely care about them and fear for
them. This is especially the case with Lisa, also known as Collette, who is on
the run after seeing her shady ex-boss and his goons beat a man to death.
Because Lisa’s mother is dying in a nursing home and Lisa wants to be nearby, she
has rented her threadbare room in the shabby boardinghouse – putting herself
under the thumb of repulsive landlord Roy Preece (who is a bit too typecast: oily,
lecherous, miserly, grossly obese and focused on getting room deposits and
rents in cash so he can spend time ignoring the building’s awful-smelling
backed-up drains). The other building residents are political-asylum-seeker
Hossein Zanjani, elderly longtime resident Vesta Collins, part-time worker
Thomas Dunbar, music teacher Gerard Bright, and teenage runaway Cher Farrell.
Lisa/Collette moves into an apartment that used to belong to Nikki, a murder
victim – and, yes, it gradually becomes clear that she was far from the only
one, and that someone in the building is responsible. The story is loosely
based on a famous British serial-murder case in which a man named Dennis Nilsen
killed at least 12 people between 1978 and 1983. But even readers familiar with
that story, which few U.S. readers will likely know, will not find The Killer Next Door spoiled by their
knowledge, because what the book is really about is how well you know, or ever
can know, the people living just a few feet away from you. It is this theme, so
similar to the one Marwood explores in The
Wicked Girls, that gives The Killer
Next Door both its power and its ability to evoke suspense: there is
something chillingly real about the realization that even a person’s stated
background may be true or false, may reveal little or much about that person’s
true feelings and motives, and may or may not be a good guide to what that
person will do and how others should deal with him or her. Both The Wicked Girls and The Killer Next Door are self-contained:
Marwood appears to have no interest in centering her mysteries on a recurring
detective or other character, and for that reason, she can take the figurative
gloves off and have things happen to her characters that are as scary and
brutal as she wishes, which in these books can be quite brutal. Indeed, Marwood’s descriptive passages will be a bit
much for some readers, taking parts of her books closer to the horror genre
than to that of mystery/thriller. Readers should be prepared: the depths of
depravity are not to be explored lightly, and Marwood does not shrink from
bringing readers into them. Those depths create a decidedly uncomfortable place
– made all the more so by the realization that it may be located right next to
you.
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