Fox Evil by Minette Walters Macmillan <br></br> The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell <br></br>Nineteen Eighty-Three by David Peace

Winter crime fiction finds sadism in shires and cruelty in cities. By Jane Jakeman and David Marley

The village mystery, as practised by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, has been much derided by the Young Turks of gory crime-writing. It was a cosy little world, where Miss Marple trotted round collecting clues and instructing the parlourmaid in her duties, while Lord Peter Wimsey headed the pecking order in county society. The pastoral theme has been abandoned by many serious British crime writers, intent on an agenda of tough urban issues. The backstreets of London, Manchester or Glasgow have become the preferred stamping-ground.

But here are two Queens of Crime, our natural successors to Christie and Sayers, with new novels in a rural setting. Both have recently forsaken it, Rendell in her London-based "Barbara Vine" novels, Walters in her graphic accounts of urban breakdown, The Shape of Snakes and Acid Row.
Now Rendell gives us another Chief Inspector Wexford story set in the murderous little town of Kingsmarkham, and Walters explores the incomparably unpleasant dynamics of an English hamlet, a rural hell-hole. Thus they return to the traditional home of British crime fiction, the muddy depths of the countryside, proving the truth of Sherlock Holmes's dictum that far more evil lurks amid the turnips than in the crowded byways of the city.

And what a countryside
it is now! Miss Marple
would be out of her head, probably mainlining. The servants have got uppity to the point of violence, the vicar has long been routed and mayhem rules at the manor. "Countryside Alliance" here can only suggest some complicated sexual square-dance by rural perverts.

Walters's squire, a left-over slice of the upper crust, is suspected of murdering his wife, and a booze-ridden miasma of incest hangs round his family like the fog over Dartmoor. A group of travellers tries to take over some disputed land: they are bitterly resented by locals who turn out to be no better than they should be, and in some cases a damned
sight worse.

The leader of the caravanners is a psychopath calling himself Fox, an animal heavily laden with signifiers, who seems to have mysterious local connections. But they are not the only incomers: a leading member of the hunt is a townie who has bought his way into the saddle.

Stirred into this combustible mix are a courageous woman army captain, and a pair of harpies who relieve the tedium by making abusive phone calls. Who has been torturing animals? Is the downtrodden domestic telling the truth about the heir to the Lord of the Manor? Walters produces her usual brilliant sleight-of-hand, always gripping, the conclusions never anticipated, plus an essential document of verisimilitude: a satisfying little map so you can see where everyone lives.

Her squire has inherited his estate. Rendell's equivalent is a rich townie who bought his, as an accessory for his fashion-model wife. He doesn't want to get involved in local life, to the point of ignoring inconvenient bodies on his land. The background to the story is a flood alert: Rendell's rural world has been almost obliterated by heavy rain and rising rivers.

Is it safe to assume, as do Wexford's superiors, that two teenagers have simply disappeared because of the floods? Or has something more sinister happened to them? And what role does a repressive sect play? The book is a page-turner but goes way beyond: this Wexford is a moving portrait of a man struggling to do his duty in a world of enormous changes, symbolised by the waters which threaten to overwhelm his beloved garden, and the violence which now plays a role in his own family.

At heart, he is a very mature and sophisticated version of that familiar and much-mocked character
of the 1930s detective story, the honest village bobby. There is an elegiac quality in this book: in all probability, Rendell will never kill Wexford off, but he is a vanishing species. Not the least disturbing thing about both books is their horrible ring of underlying truth. Our countryside may not really be as murderous as portrayed here, but,
like the Golden Age of detective fiction, it is a vanished dream.

Jane Jakeman's 'In the Kingdom of Mists' is published by Doubleday

* While the recent death of Myra Hindley refreshed the collective memory of her position as the most demonised of postwar murderers, it is one of the most prolific who takes centre-stage in David Peace's "Red Riding Quartet" of novels. Peter Sutcliffe, or The Yorkshire Ripper, was found guilty in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill a further seven. Peace's four fictionalised accounts (this is the final instalment) recreate the violence and iniquity of Sutcliffe's epoch. Each novel takes a different year as its title – 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983. The middle two deal with the Ripper murders; the first and last act as introduction and conclusion to the era.

Peace is not interested in the gentrified world of crime fiction inhabited by the likes of Morse or Marple. He has chosen to write about the Yorkshire of his youth in order to convey the horror of that time, not to provide a parlour game of whodunnit. While murder investigations provide impetus for the stories, the mechanics of detection are almost incidental to the compellingly dark brand of historiography at the core.

The descriptions of systematic police brutality and corruption are integral to this end. Three times in Nineteen Eighty-Three different characters are put through identical tortuous routines at the hands of the police; all plead with the officers to tell them what to confess to. It comes as little surprise that, shortly after the "confession" of the first character, he hangs himself. A couple of chapters later, we learn that the long arm of the law may have extended to attach
the belt to the bars of the cell window and then around the neck.

Chillingly, much of Peace's content is inspired by historical accounts. Most obviously, this is the case in Nineteen Seventy-Seven and Nineteen Eighty: the Ripper books which, while fictionalised, have been heavily researched. A barbarous scene in Nineteen Seventy-Four is based on an account in Chris Mullins's Error of Judgement, which details abuses suffered by the Birmingham Six. If readers have ever harboured any doubts as to why innocent people might, under police duress, confess to crimes they have not committed, they will doubt no more after reading these encounters.

Nineteen Eighty-Three has the most complex structure of the quartet, told by three narrators – a senior police officer, a rent boy and a solicitor – and flipping back and forth over a 14-year span. All the narrators have made previous appearances and all revisit scenes from the other novels, but it is not important to have in-depth knowledge of those books to become engulfed in this one.

Peace's prose is relentlessly bleak in its narrative content, but also in its depiction of the decaying, grey urban landscape. These factors come together to create a strong and affecting atmosphere. A further example of police corruption here involves a ring of officers as gun-toting murderers in control of a vice and pornography ring that stretches over much of the north of England. This may well sound hyperbolic, but it works plausibly and effectively in the context of Peace's world.

This is fiction that comes with a sense of moral gravity, clearly opposed to diluting the horrific effects of crime for the sake of bland entertainment. There is no light relief and, for most of the characters, no hope. Peace's series offers a fierce indictment of the era. He chooses to define a time and a place by its crimes, and thereby provides a potent antidote to the nostalgia so prevalent today.