This blog was intended to be a record of the books I read, more or less in the order that I read them. Things get a bit tricky when I write about a novel which, though essentially self-contained, is part of a sequence of books featuring the same characters and settings.
Dead Tomorrow is the fifth novel in a sequence of police procedurals about an English detective named Roy Grace. I began to read the first novel, Dead Simple, a few years ago but didn't finish it. I can't be sure why it didn't grab me but, for whatever reason, I abandoned it half-way through. Since then I have read several other series of English police novels and enjoyed them. (I particularly recommend the Charlie Resnick sequence by John Harvey and the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson.) Being subsequently at a loose end for English criminality I decided to try Roy Grace again and have now read five of the books.
In returning to Roy I was on the lookout for some clue (!) as to why I had lost interest in him the first time round. The best reason I can come up with is his belief in spiritualism, communications from the dead and similar malarkey. I did find it irritating, even the second time around. I did find that I had to metaphorically hold my nose every time he engaged in this nonsense. But I had to acknowledge that the world is full of religious people whose beliefs are just as absurd as Roy's. I have ridden in cars driven by people who believed that there is a god; I have lived in houses built by men who believed that Jesus rose from the dead; I have travelled in an aeroplane piloted by someone who believed that Mohammed went from Mecca to Jerusalem on a flying horse. At no time did I fear that the car would roll over or the house would collapse or the plane would crash simply because the person in charge held certain insane beliefs. If I am to be consistent I must accept that Roy Grace could be a competent detective even though he believes that seances might impart genuine information. (Mind you there is probably a limit to my tolerance in these matters: if I learned that the driver believed in snake handling as an expression of religion or the builder was a Scientologist or the pilot had voted for Donald Trump I'd be looking to make alternative arrangements).
Fictional detectives are like diets: invariably they are advertised as being completely different from all the others. "This is not a diet! It's an eating plan for life!" or "Our hero is not your usual copper. He's quirky! ". Roy's spiritualist inclinations are given a certain relevance by a mysterious event which occurred in his personal life, some years before the opening of the first book. From time to time we learn a little bit more about it and perhaps by the end of the last volume all will be revealed. But Roy's desperation to understand the past is quite consistent with his ridiculous beliefs and I no longer find that they interfere with my enjoyment of the novels, which are strongly plotted and well written.
