The Narrow Bed by Sophie Hannah, book review: An inventive and bleakly funny take on the crime thriller
The Narrow Bed confirms Hannah's place as the mistress of postmodern crime fiction
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Your support makes all the difference."Books are everywhere in this investigation," maintains one of the characters in Sophie Hannah's new crime novel. Indeed they are. Each of the victims of a serial killer, which the police and press are naming "Billy Dead Mates" (the murderer appears to be targeting pairs of best friends), is given a small white, home-made book.
The killer seems to have a literary bent. "I wonder if it hurts to live", reads a quotation from an Emily Dickinson poem found inside one of the books. "I measure every grief I meet", (Dickinson again) is inscribed in another. One day, stand-up comedian Kim Tribbeck finds one of these handcrafted books with a quotation from a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay: "Every bed is narrow".
And so begins a curious case for Culver Valley detective Simon Waterhouse, who features in a number of novels by the super-prolific Hannah. Even though he is described as one of the most talented detectives in the country, perhaps the world, Waterhouse has his work cut out for him here.
As you might have guessed, this is no straightforward crime novel. Composed of third person narrative, emails, fragments of Tribbeck's memoir – the appropriately named Origami – extracts from New Age stories, and pieces journalism by a feminist writer named Sondra Halliday, The Narrow Bed confirms Hannah's place as the mistress of postmodern crime fiction. In Tribbeck, she creates a heroine who has a distinctive voice (sarcastic, moody, arrogant, sexually demanding and insecure by turns) and the pages brim with dark humour.
Like in Agatha Christie's plots, everyone here has a secret, some more deadly than others. "Not all wounds or causes of hurt are visible to those on the outside", Kim writes at one point. During the course of the investigation – could she end up being the sixth victim? – Tribbeck learns some uncomfortable truths about herself and comes to the conclusion that she has some serious emotional and sexual issues needs.
Towards the end of the book, Waterhouse, in the guise of the journalist Sondra Halliday (who believes the killer must be a man motivated by a deep-seated hatred of women), writes about how the soul of a novel is its story. If that is the case then the soul of The Narrow Bed is imaginative, quirky, inventive and bleakly funny. The revelation of the identity of the killer may not be totally believable, but it is genuinely surprising.
"Without understanding why, what was the point of knowing who?" Simon Waterhouse asks himself. The question lies at the heart of all good crime literature.
Hodder & Stoughton £14.99. Order for £13.49 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030
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