Between Discretion And Propriety: Date With Evil By Julia Chapman

It’s been a while. My tardy response to volume eight of Julia Chapman’s consistently high quality detective series, set in the thinly-disguised Dales market town of Bruncliffe, has been a long train coming. Though in the profoundest sense it makes no difference, because the continuum upon which her extended narrative is set will sustain critical hiatuses, such is the standard of her writing. And for the same reason, you could dip in and out of that narrative at any point and be roundly entertained, if not enlightened as to the nature of criminal endeavour, the forensic process of detection, and the peculiarly insular mode of local culture.

For there is a universe in which Bruncliffe processes without us, unfolding in near silence like an idly munching sheep. Even within the boundaries of the story, Chapman’s great skill of simultaneous exposition opens several windows at once, yielding, often in succeeding paragraphs, a view of the same, or related, case, as perceived in different heads and in different spaces, and enabling the reader to peer in at a multivalent tableau, as though the doors of a doll’s house had been left ajar. In this way Constable Danny Bradley might mull over a suspicious looking homemade knife in temporal conjunction with Samson O’Brien’s cogitation over an (un)related case down the valley a few miles away in the market town. The immediate juxtaposition of circumstances is highly persuasive, confirming in the reader’s mind a, possibly illusory, simulacrum of events.

The seduced reviewer need not dwell too heavily on retailing plot twists and intricacies of domestic association, but rather on savouring the more salient general shifts, in tone, in heightened emotional drama, and in the capturing of moments. Such moments, and they are frequent, animate the storytelling: delivering enlightenment on terrain the reader recognises, Chapman speaks to intuition, distilling joy, and sometimes pain, into the detail. A moral rectitude informs her way of thinking, restores a natural sense of order, brings a rudimentary parity to imbalance, and justice to injustice.

The homespun monochrome attitude of Ida Capstick is a useful template for the general ethical schema. Binary in thinking, but fulsome in righteous certainty, Ida’s intuitive feel for local character, and for knowing when something does not quite add up, is a mirror to her narrator’s wider purpose: an open and transparent acknowledgment that, often, simple proprieties are the most efficient mechanism for distinguishing right from wrong, if not for inferring shades of grey. And it is no surprise that the writer, in the oddly self-referential way that novelists describe their characters, often refers to the cleaner, bacon butty-maker and part-time detective very fondly, almost as a Craven archetype, a dispenser of local wisdom whose mantra is that ‘sugar-coating’ should be ‘saved for doughnuts’.

Which is not to suggest that, respecting novelistic perceptiveness, Chapman elides nuance: policemen, criminals, estate agents and even central protagonists are multidimensional, and she responds with according pragmatism, presenting each on the basis of being entirely human, and thereby capable of behaving both reprehensibly and half-decently, if only when the world’s back is turned. And so it is with Samson O’Brien, the ‘infuriating charmer’ whose shadowy detective work in London, and sometimes further North, continues to provoke suspicion in the more credulous elements of the local community, just as he deploys his instinct to disinter truths that might seem unpalatable to those same doubters.

Whilst some blow with the wind in a weakness of indecision (Neil Taylor, former husband of Delilah, is a vapid charmer), others languish in moral freefall: the erstwhile charismatic figure of Rick Proctor – entrepreneur, lately cannabis production facilitator, and giant arsehole – is an unreconstructed villain, with fewer fingers than pies, a neat line in evasion and a gradually diminishing series of options. Proctor’s inelegant style is self-serving but skilled at ‘top-show’, venal yet concealed. Barely in control of a gang of Bulgarian drug-propagating thugs, his approach is sharpened, increasingly, on the twin axes of fear and greed. And holding up the rear of the criminal drama is the elusive figure of Stuart Lister, the lettings agent whose mysterious disappearance is Chapman’s primary plot driver and ‘frame’ upon which to hang notional blame for the hydroponic cultivation taking place in various remote rental properties around the Dales. If we know that the young man is besmitten by an honest curiosity, we also discover that a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, especially when that knowledge is harnessed by others for purposes entirely egregious.

Julia Chapman is good at the prosecution of irony in the same way that Samson is becoming practiced at the ‘prosecution’, in his amorous custody, of Delilah Metcalfe. His melting emotional reticence, and Delilah’s frequent blushes, betray a natural sincerity that counterpoints the backdrop of crime unfolding in the Dales landscape, and provide a very human fulcrum. As does their dialogue, whose mood music glows, sparks and effervesces in accordance with the burgeoning entanglement.

But it is to those ‘moments’ that our mind’s eye inexorably returns. Early in Date with Evil we find a ‘moment’ of moral equivocation that illustrates Chapman’s insight, and her unwillingness to sacrifice authenticity of emotion on the altar of plot imperative. For, here, as two Romanian victims of people trafficking, Pavel and Grigore, hole up in a barn, the autistic George Capstick (brother to Ida), whose obsession with tractors and the naming of parts punctuates every conversation, unwittingly finds himself at their mercy. The scene is remarkably touching: reminding the reader of the character of Lennie Small in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, whose overgrown innocence should dissolve the world’s bitterness, George’s harmlessness performs a similar ministry in the heart of his would-be antagonists, whose opportunity to silence the farmer melts away at the simple offering of food. The scene is both beautiful and salutary:

‘He held out a hand to the man on the floor, who shied
away like a stray dog beaten too many times.
“Don’t worry,” said Grigore. “We won’t hurt you.”’

With tidbits disappearing at an alarming rate from the siblings’ fridge, small wonder that Ida, who is singularly unpracticed in the practical application of inference, except in the rough-hewned, nose-tapping sense, is baffled by her brother’s sudden interest in food. For some of Chapman’s characters are obliged to leave latitudinous thinking to their creator. Gifted an overview, it is to her narrator that we are indebted: for the slow-drip of insight, for the alarm-bell moment that may, or may not, reveal a cataclysmic twist. Or for getting inside the head of an ‘actor’ to give away a profound character trait. For blunt farmer Clive Knowles, whose wife, Carol, is lying comatosed in Leeds General, as a consequence of being caught in an explosion at the late Pete Ferris’ caravan, we hear, counter-intuitive in the context of his character, of desperate love, of murderous revenge and of a touching commitment to Carol, that runs deeper than we imagined. That Carol is the cousin of Ida is one more manifestation in a network of local connections underwriting the wider coherence of Chapman’s strategic approach: the supervening overview gives her narrative structural depth and a sense of continuity.

The pace becomes frenetic as we approach denouement in Bruncliffe: a measure of Julia Chapman’s skill at intricate plot construction, the drawing together of a plethora of threads is achieved with singular aplomb. As DCI Frank Thistlethwaite, Samson and several local coppers cogitate over the sudden disappearance in the back of a Range Rover of Delilah, and Tolpuddle is turned into a nervous wreck, nothing prepares us for the mayhem and revelation that ensues.

And it is fitting, apropos of the novel's defining moments, that the scene is accompanied by a summer storm whose biblical power is neatly counterpointed, in turn, by the manmade maelstrom of explosion and flame that marks the story's crux. Reminiscent of the conclusion to Henry Williamson’s The Gale of the World, wherein Exmoor and hinterland are battered by flood and deluge, Chapman’s storm is a metaphor for a dramatic human finale, and a promissory of the reconciliatory, epiphanic calm that must follow. As if George Capstick’s inarticulate shorthand – ‘Dog, devil, steward’ - could be shocked into lucidity by the wild kinesis of nature:

‘And as she’d turned into Thorpdale, she’d
been treated to the spectacular sight of a large ash tree in
the field next to the road being felled by the wind. Crashing
sideways, it landed across the telegraph wires and snapped
them in two, leaving the broken ends whipping around in
the gale.’