The Psalm Killer
Chris Petit
Pan pbk, 646 pgs, £5.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
We finger Chris Petit's novel for serious once we cop an eyeful of its substantial bibliography and glossary. And it's big. Very. Ostensibly it's a murder mystery unfolding in the mid-eighties, around the time John Stalker arrived in Northern Ireland to investigate the RUC's Shoot-To-Kill policy against Republican terrorists. Much of it, however, flashes back to earlier - but no more innocent - times over a decade earlier. The Psalm Killer covers as much time as territory.
Another English copper, DI Cross, is gifted a particularly bizarre murder on a Belfast road: the eyes were gouged out before the corpse was tossed in front of a speeding car. And the head might be just so much pulp, but the law soon realise this victim's been squirreled away in a deep freeze since his death.
Inevitable thoughts of sectarianism are foiled when subsequent victims span Belfast's religious divide, their means of death equally varied. And yet patterns are to be discerned, not least in the psalms cryptically published before each killing, and in the sinister numerology of the victims' ages. Cross and his young female assistant Westerby must fight to convince their superiors that a serial killer is on the loose, somehow cutting a swathe through the complex politics and vested interests of this most divided of cities.
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
That's the problem with The Psalm Killer. For all the added local colour, this is still what Thomas Harris on his holidays. To his credit Petit feels the necessity to dive headlong into the convolutions of the island of Ireland, and that's where we find the book at its most successful - instead of simply using the Troubles as convenient backdrop, the author actually ties his crafty killer into this maze of paranoid conspiracy. But as the bodies pile up more and more so do we come to care less and less.
We could care less that Cross' marriage is on the rocks. We could care less about his energetic fling with Westerby. And, serial-killered-out, we care less and less about the murders as they become more and more convoluted. Instead, it's the historical background and religious divides that exercise us. We want more of the Protestant Shankill Butchers, who would abduct innocent Catholics on a weekend and torture and execute them before an invited audience. And we definitely want more of the alleged association between the terrorists and security forces, and the illegal black ops sanctioned by nefarious military and government officials.
But instead we get really too much of this deranged and ultimately dreary nut. And altogether too much of Cross' lifeless home life. It pads out an already dangerously over-long book, and Petit's prose just isn't up to carrying much excess baggage.
A fitter, healthier, and altogether leaner 300 pager could have had us gasping, but Petit opts for the proverbial blunt instrument rather than the much needed scalpel, with all that implies. Disappointing.