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Self-Defence
Jonathan Kellerman
Warner Books paperback, 504 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)

Ninth time out for Kellerman’s child psychologist slash detective, Alex Delaware, promises much and delivers plenty, even if one too many subplots does seem to be left to fend for itself by the end. There’s a discussion over the relative merits of the death penalty in the first few pages (Delaware is opposed but weakening; his friend, gay policeman Milo Sturgis, is seriously in favour) but although it hovers Kellerman never feels the need to resolve anything. Likewise, the psychopathic Shwandt, his Manson-like devotees The Bogettes, and a copycat killer threaten to add an unhinged element to the book, as if Kellerman was about to encroach on Thomas Harris territory, but are tossed away in a resolution so brief, ‘perfunctory’ scarcely seems adequate.

Instead what we have is Delaware treating Lucy Lowell, a young woman disturbed by jury service at the gruesome Shwandt trial. In a recurring dream her younger self sees three men seemingly burying the corpse of a woman in the woods, and Delaware, not unreasonably, begins to wonder how much of the dream is fantasy and how much buried memory.

Lucy turns out to be the daughter of the arrogant, misanthropic, Hemingwayesque Morris Bayard Lowell, a once celebrated author now living in self-imposed exile on his rambling estate up the road. And when the young woman attempts suicide with her head in an oven, a quest for truth stretching back to the heady days of the late sixties beckons our heroic psychologist.

A psychologist with a friend on the force and occasional consulting work for the boys in blue is useful; TV’s Cracker does much the same thing on inferior weather and a lot less money. Literature these books certainly ain’t. But what Kellerman has always been good at is producing, year on year, these huge great doorstop suspense novels; gigantic jigsaws replete with legions of characters, plots, subplots, hidden identities and motivations. It doesn’t always reward too close attention, just go with the flow.

Self-Defence at least lets its author play lit crit, even going so far as to pen a few pages of old man Lowell’s godforsaken macho verse from his last book, one roundly slated by critics. (Being crap is a handy excuse, of course; Kellerman doesn’t go so far as give us anything the man’s reputation was actually built on.) He also allows himself an attack on the notion that inside every criminal mind lurks an artist struggling to get out with the misogynist Trafficant, a felon feted by Lowell for his ‘earthy’ prison diaries. For every Jimmy Boyle there must be a dozen Charles Mansons.

But all this – like that dispute over capital punishment – is icing on what is essentially another solid, quality Kellerman cake (a rather obese and talky final section tying up complex plot threads notwithstanding). Not for a while now has he fashioned anything like the lumpen mess of the execrable private eyes of other authors. The only mystery remaining to be solved is why the similar but relentlessly humdrum Patricia Cornwall seems to get better critical notices. That’s one case even the good Dr Delaware would have trouble cracking.