We Know What You Did by Kirsty Lockwood review: 'trips along on its clichés'
This contemporary take on the locked-room mystery doesn’t compare favourably with the classics of the sub-genre, writes Stuart Kelly
I’d like to begin by offering a précis of this novel – a less fulsome version of a jacket-flap blurb – and then pose a serious question. So, in Lockwood’s debut, we begin with a young woman, whom we later learn is 19 years old, called Odette Adin, being manhandled into a police station covered in blood. Later we learn that she is an influencer, with her successful TikTok channel having just shown its first live-stream, on which it seems that, offscreen, Odette has murdered her partner on said channel. The individual in question is Amos Michaels, an 80-year-old former psychologist, and the two had struck up an unlikely but (crucial to their online success) heartwarming friendship. Over 600 people tuned in to watch and minutes later Odette was arrested. It becomes, of course, something of a sensation, yet the eye of the media storm, like the eye of an actual hurricane, is still, silent and impassive. The strapline reads “The World Saw Her Kill Him” (for the sake of pedantry let it be pointed out this was not a snuff movie: she was on camera, and came back with a corpse, which she then struck) and “If Only She’d Tell Us Why”.
Two points to note before my question, because they are salient. The jacket-flap also says the novel is “tense, thrilling and unputdownable… with a dark twist you’ll never see coming!” I’ll be the judge of that. It is also fulsomely endorsed by Nicola Sturgeon, who is apparently contemplating her own crime novel career.
My question is: what can I say? In a way, this is a problem with all crime fiction. I cannot tell you the solution, though I can say the “you’ll never see coming” is not wholly true; not because of my legendary perspicacity but because there are so many twists at the end you can pick and choose. None of the results of the twists has any consequence anyway.
Is this a mirror, even just a crack’d one, to our society, and does its value rest there? The obsession with the performative online self and the idea of media spaces as sanitised versions of off-screen abuse are relevant enough, and future scholars of the crime novel can merrily footnote Ant and Dec, and Midsomer Murders, and Waitrose trifle with marmalade jelly to their hearts’ content. One claim about the crime novel is it “tells us about ourselves”, but so do romcoms and horror and sci-fi and Booker winners. So should the question be “Is it good / enjoyable / worth £20”? It reads easily enough, and given the author is a journalist with prizes, that seems a bit sine qua non. The prose doesn’t present any challenges, and trips along on its clichés (p.1: broken puppet, meaty hands, usual spiel, retching sobs, rooted to the floor, felt her own blood drain away from her face, leaving her suddenly cold). Man oh man; I don’t usually advocate buying a thesaurus.
But would I buy the next one, and assuredly there shall be a next one, or buy a second hand copy of a Dorothy L Sayers to re-read? I cannot see this sort-of-locked-room mystery being the future’s equivalent to Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie or even Ruth Rendell and PD James. It is not re-readable, for a reason. In many ways this is a novel that does not want to be a novel. Odette goes to the library, and we are even told that a friendly librarian sets aside novels for her, but we don’t know what they are. We do know that she takes away discarded newspapers and magazines before meeting Amos, who gives her a mobile to read papers: this is a world without paywalls. But we do have other media (Babe, anything with Hugh Grant, Miss Congeniality, A Clockwork Orange – unnamed but significant, Bear Grylls, Detectorists). Even the shuttlecock switches between “Then” and “Now” seem like a convenient mechanism for artificial cliffhangers.
This is a novel where it transpires that most men are bores, fools, ogres, psychos or lowlifes. Female rage is always not just reactive but necessary, and transcends morality. No spoilers remember, so you won’t know if its the cleaner in the police station or the friend in the benefits office or any of the characters who come with “red herring” tattooed on their foreheads who say this: “Murder is never acceptable. Apart from on those very specific occasions when it is…”. I am quietly wry about a former First Minister being so enthusiastic about a novel which says the law is the law except when it’s not.
Nobody is in denial about some of the nastiness described in this book. At the same time, we can have tabloid shrieks or we can have cautious debates. If you want a novel about coercion, subversion, collusion and the madness of crowds, try Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé – it is not an easy read, but to quote the Man in Black in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something”.
We Know What You Did by Kirsty Lockwood, Orion, £20
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