Gabrielle Lord

In 2004, New York-based publisher Akashic Books released Brooklyn Noir, a collection of short fiction written under a specific brief. Stories had to be set in that neighbourhood and feature noir themes: simmering familial revenge, cheating and double-crossing, sexual betrayal, domestic discord, murderous trysts, down-at-heel detectives ...

In her fourteenth novel, in a career that began in 1980 with Fortress, Gabrielle Lord returns to the series of books that feature the troubled and trouble-attracting private investigator, Gemma Lincoln. Shattered, the fourth in the series, is the most densely and effectively plotted of them. Gathered here are key people from earlier novels: Gemma’s lover, the undercover policeman Steve Brannigan; her best friend, Sergeant Angie McDonald; a former street kid called the Ratbag; Gemma’s sometime colleague Mike Moody. Still shadowing Gemma’s life are the memories of the murder of her mother and, much later, her successful but nearly fatal efforts to clear her father of that crime.

Garry Disher’s Snapshot continues his police procedural series about Mornington Peninsula detective Hal Challis, begun with Dragon Man in 1999 (before that, Disher wrote an excellent series of thrillers about a career criminal named Wyatt, starting with Kickback, 1991). Snapshot is 100 pages longer than Dragon Man, but, paradoxically, it is much more pared back, leaner and smarter about what a police procedural (PP) can be.

Gabrielle Lord’s novels – Fortress, Tooth and Claw and now, Jumbo, are all topical, readable, and (I expect) highly marketable. Lord is a scriptwriter as well as a novelist and each of these books seems like a transit point between a great idea and the kind of film which makes you lean forward in your seat and temporarily abandon regular breathing. There is, however, much to be said for them, as novels. They are thrillers, but they are not merely escapist. The plots dislocate everyday events in a way which questions the validity of what passes as socially acceptable. On the other hand, pace, suspense, and social critique seem to substitute for the subtlety and detail which would transform these books into something more than temporarily exciting and even instructive reading experiences. For all the immediacy and significance of Lord’s novels, the vibrancy of her work often seems to me to lie in its potential, rather than in the text at hand. In this respect Jumbo, the most recent novel, does not surpass its predecessors.