2023 mystery, seventh in the Karen Pirie series. As COVID restrictions
start in Scotland, a researcher at the National Library contacts the
Historic Cases Unit with an unfinished manuscript in the papers of a
dead writer which shows some remarkable parallels with a real
murder.
I haven't read a Pirie, or a McDermid, before, but Alice
Violett recommended this to me after
my review of The Postscript Murders. Like that book, it's a crime
writer writing about the foibles of (invented) crime writers. In this
there's an extra level, because the manuscript, by the recently dead
Jake Stein, describes in detail a murder a lightly-veiled version of
him committed in order to throw the blame on his former protégé who'd
surpassed him.
So that's the primary plot. Was Stein's book intended to be a
roman-à-clef confession, with the plan aborted by his sudden death?
Or was he just taking a ghoulish interest in the case and
confabulating based on what he could find out?
Meanwhile Pirie has moved into her lover's luxury flat while he's
keeping things going in the Highlands, and there are tensions as they
try to do the long-distance thing. Her juniors have their own
problems. And the whole thing is being done under contact-limitation
rules; for me there's a glorious nostalgia here, to the days when
people took COVID seriously and were prepared to make the tiniest
effort not to pass it on to everyone they met.
But the body of this is McDermid's enjoyable look into a world she
clearly knows well, and if "None of the fictional characters in Past
Lying is based in any respect on real writers, living or dead. Cross
my heart and hope to die!" then at the very least there are types here
that I recognise from other genre writers. There's even a mention of
one of my mild concerns, the way some writers just seem to enjoy
putting their fictional women in horrible situations a little too much
and clearly find an audience in doing so.
Altogether rather splendid, and I shall dive into McDermid's extensive
back catalogue.
Karen sighed. ‘I don't know. It's a bit thin. I've got a whole shelf
of Chris Brookmyre's books but I don't expect him to pop round and
murder me.’
‘That's because he's never met you, boss,’