DANGEROUS DAVIES AND THE LONELY HEART - Book review

 

Leslie Thomas’s fourth Dangerous Davies title Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart was published 1999.

Davies is still living in the same boarding house, his estranged wife in a separate room, his lugubrious pal Mod in another. Davies has been retired from the police force and has decided to try his hand at private investigating. His attention is drawn to the multiple murders of women who have answered lonely hearts advertisements. He has also taken on the case of a missing young girl student (Anna Beauchamp) and a psychologist (Carl Swanee) that might involve a secret worth millions of pounds.

Yet again Thomas has peopled his book with droll, witty, outrageous and mysterious characters, including a gypsy, an overweight hairdresser, and a policeman who gets nosebleeds if he goes upstairs. He also displays his gift for short visual description:

‘He always found tombs interesting… It was like walking through a small shut town. There were angels, too, standing more in hope than in help, their wings white with bird droppings, their mouths half-open, everlastingly lost for words’ (p113). And: ‘… her flowered summer dress like a moving rockery’ (p118).

One of the murdered women left a very bright young child, who they called Harold; Davies meets him with a social worker. ‘They sat on some bleak chairs. Harold’s feet did not reach the ground’ (p132). The scenes with young Harold are heartfelt and one wonders if Thomas thought back to his time as a Barnardo’s boy, when he was motherless, when writing these poignant scenes. Confusingly, one of the owners of the lonely hearts agency (Happy Life Bureau) employing him is also called Harold!

Thomas even imbues inanimate things with character: ‘He had always been reluctant to trust, or risk, the old car on a motorway, but now he quickly found himself on the M4, heading west. The Rover seemed to revel in the new responsibility, snorting like a horse which had not had the luxury of a gallop in a long time’ (p189)

His enquiries take him to the coast of Wales. ‘I was the wildest place that Davies had ever seen. Even the sunshine seemed threatening’ (p217)

One of Davies’s contacts is Sestrina, a beautiful woman who happens to have a painting of a ship – The Lonely Heart – on her wall. In typical private eye fashion, there is a rapport between this pair. ‘She crooked her fingertip and beckoned him. He felt himself groan inwardly, the groan of a man who knew he was in trouble, a groan of pleasure’ (p243). There follows a quite erotic seduction scene with an icy edge to it…

This is perhaps the bloodiest Dangerous Davies outing, and none the worse for that. It was a pleasure from beginning to end.

Editorial comment:

‘feet did not reach the ground’ – I think it should be floor, not ground, but it’s a common mistake to make, perhaps: I feel that ground is ‘outside’ while floor is ‘inside’. Maybe I’m being pedantic!

Two characters called Harold?

Two character names beginning with the same letter: Sophia and Sestrina.

Some writers get fixated on numbers (me included; in years gone by I over-used 17 for some unknown reason!). Thomas here has a thing for forties – ‘The door of number forty-three’ (p126); ‘number forty’ (p162) and ‘Top flat, forty-one’ (p181).