Gris, the new noir

>> There's no black and white in Turnstone

by JULIET WATERS

Last weekend I went out with a friend who needed the right book in the same way some people need the right medication. She was burnt, overwhelmed by her responsibilities at a meaningful but frustrating job. She needed escape, a page-turner that wasn't so intense that it would stress her out, so romantic that she'd fall apart, or so violent she'd lose sleep. Finally, it couldn't be so interesting that she might be distracted from a mountain of work.

It hurt that I couldn't just name the perfectly tempered thriller off the top of my head, the way it must hurt some psychiatrists that they can't just prescribe an anti-depressant with no side effects. Then I started reading Graham Hurley's Turnstone.

For lack of a better word, I would classify Turnstone as gris, a sophisticated mystery where the stakes are more emotional than moral. In gris there is no black and white, just shades of corruption. In Inspector Joe Faraday of the Portsmouth Police, Hurley has created a character who is more slowburning than hard-boiled.

Faraday has reached his limits emotionally and professionally. A currently booming British coastal city, Portsmouth also has an entrenched criminal underground from centuries of poverty. While corporate development flourishes, public security is being cut down to the bone and organized crime is growing like a weed. Funds that might once have gone to complex, tragic murders, are now being allocated to protecting businesses from petty crime. After 20 years as a highly skilled investigator, Faraday, an irritation to his superiors, is the most likely candidate to be put in charge of a task force on car theft.

On a personal level, Faraday is dealing with a gaping abyss. The 22-year-old deaf son he has raised alone is in love and planning on moving to France. There's a Chunnel-sized hole in Faraday's heart which he's filling with an obsession for a case that no one else has any interest in. An eight-year-old girl has reported her father, Stuart Maloney, missing and while everyone, including Maloney's ex-wife is convinced that he simply bailed, Faraday has a hunch that he's been murdered.

If this sounds a bit weepy, Hurley keeps the mist at bay by bringing in a darker subplot that pits Faraday against a nemesis who may be more of a friend than he realizes. In many ways detective Paul Winter plays Satan to Faraday's God in a police procedural version of Paradise Lost--paradise being the time when there was enough money going around to grease informants, follow vague hunches, and do things by the book. While Faraday plays it straight, trying to prioritize the most difficult crimes, Winters plays the street, using sadistic psychological manipulation in lieu of money to maintain his network of informers.

"Paul Winter loved informants. He loved their vulnerability and their bent little ways. He loved the smell of greed and neediness they brought with them for their periodic meets. He loved the way they stitched each other up, all the time, for nothing more than a drink, a couple of quid and the chance to settle a score or two. And most of all he loved being the conductor of this extraordinary orchestra of fuck-wits, and whingers, and no-brain low-life. He called them his Chorus of Dwarfs. And he taught them to sing better than any other detective in the city."

An intense romance that seems to rise suddenly out of nowhere like a coastal storm adds power to the novel. But what really keeps one reading is Hurley's talent for sudden and subtle plot turns that are as gracefully executed as the flight of a seabird.

Which is why it's a true shock that Turnstone has an astonishingly cheap ending. Cheap but unerringly appropriate in the world that Faraday is stuck in. A world too much like our own.

Turnstone by Graham Hurley, Orion, pb, 280pp, $25.95