American crime novelist Elizabeth George made her debut in 1989 with A Great Deliverance. Apart from promulgating the trend amongst compatriots such as Martha Grimes to fill Scotland Yard with English Milords dabbling as detectives, her British-set debut was good enough to earn her both the Anthony and Agatha awards for Best First Novel.
With its sequels, George rotated her main protagonist; so that with Payment in Blood, Lynley’s lover Lady Helen Clyde became the central character. From then on George alternated Lynley with her other main protagonists, until with the eighth novel -- In The Presence of the Enemy -- Lynley’s assistant, the truculent Sergeant Barbara Havers, took centre stage.
Gradually Havers took centre stage at least as often as Lynley, showing George becoming more and more fascinated with the real world (rather than the faux-Holmes stereotypical view of Olde London Towne), in which Havers battles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, befriends a young Asian girl, and upsets her colleagues at every opportunity. In short, she became as close to a real person as any work of fiction can.
Now, with her new novel, What Happened Before He Shot Her, George has left her usual cast behind.
At the end of her previous Lynley-centred novel, With No One As Witness, the reader was confronted with the unexpected and shocking denouement of a pregnant Helen Lynley being gunned down by a teenager. Even more shockingly, it emerged that Helen’s death bore no relation to the main story, but was instead a red herring.
With What Came Before He Shot Her, George steps outside her usual cast of characters, to tell not so much a whodunit as a whydunnit. This novel is the story of twelve-year-old Joel Campbell, who with his elder sister Ness, and younger brother Toby, goes to live with his aunt Kendra. The children’s mother is in a psychiatric institute, having witnessed their father’s death in a random shooting.
The children are immediately prey to the local hoodlums in the rough part of London in which they have ended up, and in desperation – as the ‘man’ of the household – Joel makes a Faustian pact with the local Godfather.
What Came Before He Shot Her is by no means a straightforward story, although it’s ending is as inevitable as any tragedy. Those who have seen the headlines about teenagers being killed in London will know all too well the refrain that ‘the victim had so much potential.’ While Joel is an embryonic killer, he is as much a victim as Helen Lynley, but a victim of circumstance and conspiracy.
The strength of George’s narrative is that several times she offers the reader hope that Joel and his siblings will escape their seemingly pre-ordained slide into tragedy, Joel through his poetry, Ness with a course in millinary, which when that hope is dashed makes the inevitable tragedy all the more moving. This is an outstanding novel by a writer at the very top of her form.
