In the process, she carries out a forensic, and timely, examination of the nature of privilege and empathy. Leaving the murder squad behind, she flips the perspective of a police procedural to regard the process from the other side, through a narrator who is, at various points, potential victim, suspect and witness. But there are murders to be solved, so her books – though garlanded with critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic – have tended to be labelled as genre fiction.įrench’s first standalone novel, The Wych Elm, might change that. Her writing is poetic and scalpel-sharp, rich in allusions to literature, myth, history and contemporary politics her exploration of character is full of insight. It’s a source of bafflement to me that French has not yet been nominated for a major literary award, and I can’t help feeling that she almost certainly would have been if her characters weren’t detectives. The distinction would work well for Tana French’s acclaimed series of novels featuring the fictional Dublin murder squad (soon to be a TV series, scripted by Sarah Phelps). T he screenwriter Steven Moffat once said that his hit show Sherlock was “not a crime drama, but a drama about a man who solves crimes”.
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