SCRIBBLE
In praise of M.J. Arlidge In this edition, Head of English, Mr Aldridge, celebrates the work of a contemporary crime writer, M.J. Arlidge
T
he excitement of discovering a new author is one of literature’s great pleasures, especially when there is a good body of work you can delve into as a reader; just like getting a great recommendation for a TV boxset and binge-watching it, I have recently devoured the seven D.I. Helen Grace novels by contemporary British writer M.J. Arlidge, and cannot wait to begin the latest instalment in the series Down to the Woods. In my case, the recommendation for Arlidge’s works came from a former student, who studied English Literature at A-level at Shrewsbury Hight School; she so regularly drew links in her study of crime fiction to the first Helen Grace novel Eeny Meeney that she gave it to me as a parting gift in 2017. I must admit to leaving it about a year until I began reading, but became instantly hooked by Arlidge’s style, his central character and the criminal world of Southampton that he so masterfully constructs; the next six novels were very quickly purchased and read almost back to back.
“There are countless moments in the average life when you have to decide whether to open yourself up or bury yourself deep. In love, at work, among your family, with friends, there are moments when you have to decide whether you are ready to reveal your true self.”
M.J. Arlidge, Eeny Meeny
Arlidge’s background is as a writer for television, including work on Silent Witness, and you can really tell this in his novels; the narratives are phenomenally fast-paced, offering the reader constant mini-climaxes during the over-arching narrative trajectory, as well as twists and turns that would clearly punctuate the endings of television episodes extremely successfully. Like many successful writers of crime, Arlidge has a number of constants; the location remains the same in all of the novels, using Southampton as the basis for a criminal world which simply does not stop; the lead character is DI Helen Grace, who grows in complexity and depth as the series of novels progress; there are also a number of subsidiary characters on the Southampton force and also ffrom local press who also become ‘rounder’ and more developed from novel to novel – an uneasy relationship between the police force and regional news journalists is particularly pointed and crafted. The recipe is a classic one, but Arlidge executes it with a sense of panache and playfulness that makes his prose electric and the very definition of ‘page-turners’.
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