The Mermaids Singing

THE MERMAIDS SINGING is the first book in the Tony Hill & Carol Jordan mystery series that inspired the TV series, "Wire in the Blood". I had already listened to books four through six, eight, and nine, so I knew that Ms. McDermid doesn't mind putting her characters through hell. (So much so, that what I've learned from book eight has ensured that I never want to read book seven.) I'd eagerly listened to the first 10 CDs, but it took me 11 days and listening to three other books (the first a harmless children's novel), to get up the nerve to listen to the last two. One knows a novel is compelling if even after the horrors in CD 11, one has to put in CD 12 and listen to it. This is the first time psychologist and criminal profiler Dr. show more Tony Hill has been asked to help the Branfield Police Force, so the first time he's teamed up with Detective Inspector Carol Jordan. First Jordan and her boss, John Brandon, have to deal with the rest of the police being unwilling to admit they have a serial killer on their hands. Hill has already figured that out. We get to know the mind of the killer through excerpts from the killer's diary, so we already know how correct Dr. Hill is with most of his profile. I knew the source of Dr. Hill's psychological problems from a later book, so I made an incorrect assumption at first. I was surprised that a couple of my guesses turned out to be correct, but I still didn't guess the biggest revelation. This is not a book for the squeamish, but it is very, very good. show less

A nasty serial killer stalks a northern English city. The police bring in a criminal psychologist, Tony Hill, to help them find the baddie by providing a psychological profile. Some of the coppers are unconvinced that fancy academics can be of any use with proper police work. Will Hill manage to vindicate his methods, or will old fashioned policing do the job, or will the killer evade them all?

This is all quite nicely set up, with the clash of old and new policing styles framing a tense investigation, with the usual wrong turns, red herrings, grunt work and flashes of inspiration. The array of characters are familiar but not too stock: the pushy local journalist, the compromised police source, the instinct-first inspector, the ambitious show more young copper, the handy computer guy, etc. The tension does ratchet up, the plot beats are propulsive without being too contrived, the central protagonists are believably human. The psychology stuff is arguably a little too mumbo-jumbo, as Hill gets inside the mind of the killer through a sort of empathic role-play, but there’s not so much of it that it becomes tiresome. And McDermid is very good at making things genuinely nasty without straying into torture porn.

However, there’s one really odd feature of the plotting that mars the whole book. There might be spoilers here. See, by this stage of the development of the crime novel, we all kind of know the rules. We’re not in the golden age of puzzlers, where clues are scattered along the way and the detective brings them together in a denouement. But we are expecting that, somehow, what happens at the end of the book will satisfyingly and somewhat surprisingly pull together what happened earlier, often bringing into prominence facts and events that were presented somewhat incidentally when introduced. So as readers, we’re on the lookout for those facts and events. Writers have the challenge of introducing them in a way that allows for surprise, fitting them into the book in a natural-ish way, such
that their relevance only later becomes apparent.

Now, throughout this book, Tony is subject to dirty phone calls from a mysterious woman. He has no idea who this woman is, and we’re given to understand that these have been going on since before we met him, and they just sort of started happening. As the investigation unfurls, Tony is often interrupted in his rest by one of these calls, which he tolerates and somewhat enjoys as a therapeutic aid for his erectile problems. But they’re presented as totally unconnected to the matter at hand, and Tony exhibits no wish to think much about who this person is, or why they started ringing him.
Well, gee, huh. Do you think maybe there might actually be a connection? Do you think this woman might actually be –gasp! – the serial killer? And do you think this wouldn’t be so clangingly obvious if the otherwise curious, alert, clever protagonist made, like, some attempt to think through what all this mucky phone stuff was about?

The problem, essentially, is that in straining so keep the the phone calls apparently incidental, McDermid makes it apparent how artificial their place in the book is, and so makes it obvious that they’ll turn out to be very significant. And this in turn undermines a lot of the rest of the book, which is about how acutely Hill brings his smarts to bear on profiling the man who’s knocking off unfortunates. I don’t think this is deliberate undermining, designed to ironically show the limitations of the methods. The methods do, in the end, triumph. I think it’s just a really clumsy bit of plotting that somewhat spoils an otherwise very decent read. show less

I suspect McDermid has been influenced by Thomas Harris but she reworks the formula and avoids making her serial killer into a 'bogey man' like Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is a force and not a real being. The killer in Mermaids is a real person and the novel is scarier as a result. An enormously enjoyable read as a clinical psychologist Tony Hill - who has his own problems - matches wits with a very sick and intelligent killer.

The writing here is wonderful (at least four stars, though probably more), but I just can't handle the grisly descriptions, even when they are beautifully written.

A psychological profile & a female detective try to hunt down a torturer.

Found this an unpleasant novel as made to feel an unwilling voyeur watching a serial torturer. But the profiler was creepy too with his serial impotence & willingness to get into the minds of abusers.

Well written but I won't be picking up another Val McDermid book any time soon. I listened to this, and the first word of each chapter was weirdly missing which added to my unease.

After finishing Mapp and Lucia a while back, I felt in need of murder and mayhem. I can't say I've ever felt that before; I don't remember ever hating one book's characters enough to want to go read graphic descriptions of a serial killer's work. Although the demographic being murdered in The Mermaids Singing was completely different from that I had a wished death on in M&L, it still hit the spot.

That sounds a bit twisted, doesn't it…

It hit the spot surprisingly well, in fact. Maybe I've watched too much "Criminal Minds" and "Walking Dead" and so on over the years (and Wire in the Blood); maybe I've become jaded. Because this was beyond all doubt graphic. I usually do avoid this subsection of the genre, but back when Netflix still show more included streaming video with all subscriptions I stumbled on and became a huge fan of "The Wire in the Blood", and being as this is what that was based on, I wanted more of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan.

And that's exactly what I got. As it turns out, the first episode of the TV series was a remarkably faithful adaptation of this first book. Happily, I saw it long enough ago that details had faded, and my memory is bad enough that the end wasn't spoiled.

This isn't one of the sporting class of murder mysteries, where the clues are planted throughout the story for the clever and attentive reader to pick up and put together. This is pure procedural, with the coppers both dreading and hoping for the next victim of the serial killer on the loose: dreading, for obvious reasons, and anticipating in hopes that with a new body will come more data toward finding the killer. Intercut with the personal and professional lives of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan and their colleagues are journal entries from the killer, shadowing the timeline without giving away any real detail about the killer except how contact was made with the victims.

But it all really comes down to those two, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. They're terrific characters. I don't know that I'm quite jaded enough to pursue the book series - but it's good to know it's out there. show less

From the beginning it’s clear that this is a gritty, fast paced novel which will involve fully drawn and vulnerable characters, graphic descriptions of torture and a focus on the psychological elements of police procedure involved in solving the crime.

The initial chapter is narrated by a murderer who explains their fascination with torture devices and describes murder as a ‘strange and exotic drama’. The detachment of the narrator is chilling as they claim that they were compelled to commit murder the first time, but soon afterwards began thinking about how they could do it better next time. The quotations at the beginning of each chapter reinforce this idea of murder as a type of art that can be worked on. The intelligence of the show more murderer is clear through their language and grammar; their cruelty is even clearer as they admire the minds of those who perfected torture devices.

Throughout the novel, the narrative shifts between this first person narrative and the third person narrative following the pursuit of this murderer. Intriguingly, the first person texts are clearly some kind of record of events, and although in this first narrative passage the murderer only really refers to this first murder, in the first real chapter we learn that three men are already dead. As the novel develops this time difference allows the reader to anticipate learning more about the terrible murders – each man was tortured and mutilated before being dumped, naked, in well-known gay cruising areas. This is not a novel for those with a sensitive stomach, but details are not gratuitous.

Tony Hill is the next character that we meet and he seems incredibly uncomfortable in his own skin, choosing which persona to try on in the morning. Gradually more characters are introduced from the police force, all of whom are involved in trying to solve the individual murders without admitting that there is a serial killer on the loose. Not everyone is happy with this situation and McDermid establishes a lot of tension between the law enforcement officials which is only escalated when Tony is taken as an official Psychological Profiler to help them catch this killer.

Characters’ motives and lives are skillfully drawn out, with just the right amount of information given to allow the reader to follow the twists and turns of the plot. A possible love interest is established early on, but Tony has some serious sexual hang-ups which create difficulties here, and the investigation quickly takes a very serious tone when the next victim turns out to be a little too familiar…

This is an effective psychological thriller which will keep you wondering until the end as the police have very few leads, just an increasingly detailed psychological profile, and the killer seems capable of extreme manipulation. The interest of this novel lies in the relationships between characters and developments in the plot, but is primarily in Tony’s interpretation of the evidence. It is genuinely gripping: I read the whole novel in two days.

There is also an implied criticism of police procedure in the story of the treatment of one suspect. The development of this situation gives the novel a greater level of depth and led to a truly disturbing event which reverberated in the novel and in my mind long after I’d finished reading.

This novel won the 1995 CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year and is the start of a series of novels following Tony Hill’s work as a clinical psychologist. The front cover of my edition includes a quotation from Minette Walters, another excellent psychological crime writer, which effectively sums up the novel: ‘compelling and shocking’. show less