A young man has been shot on a city street at night by an unknown assailant. Two detectives rush to the hospital, sirens blaring, to interview him before he goes into surgery. To anyone who has ever read a piece of crime fiction or watched a cop show on TV, the opening of Keith Ridgway's new novel, set on the mean streets of north-east London, will be familiar. From the first page, however, things seem slightly out of sync. Amid the commotion, one of the detectives – Hawthorn – is fast asleep. He wakes up en route to the hospital but cannot easily shake off his dream. And its atmosphere lingers.
The victim claims he has been shot not by a person but by a car: a vintage automobile with running boards and silver door handles, "like in a black-and-white film". Before we can get to the bottom of this, our attention is directed elsewhere. In the second chapter, a young pickpocket gets a job driving for a gang boss named Mishazzo. Hawthorn and his partner, Child, reappear on detective business – they are keeping tabs on Mishazzo's activities – but the story is no less concerned with the pickpocket's private life: he and his girlfriend are unable to voice their most intimate feelings for each other; they write them down in a book, which they hide in a drawer in the kitchen and never openly discuss.
Instead of returning to the original case, the narrative spirals outwards to investigate other lives that connect, however tangentially, with the two detectives. These stories become increasingly bizarre. A publisher receives a manuscript about a gang of wolves fighting for dominance over a sort of parallel London; his attempts to decipher it lead him to the margins of the city – and his own sanity. Many of the characters here are disturbed, delusional and potentially dangerous – to themselves and anyone else.
This is a detective novel in which the mysteries of people's lives threaten to overshadow mysteries born of criminal activity. The crime that gives the novel its initial momentum fades away like the half-glimpsed vintage car, never to reappear. We don't witness the detectives solving anything of particular note: they, too, are preoccupied by personal issues. Hawthorn is openly gay and has to put up with constant ribbing from colleagues and his own family. And his grip on the reality of his job grows increasingly strained.
Meanwhile, the ostensible bad guys, the Mishazzo gang, are never shown doing anything illegal: the exact nature of their criminality remains undisclosed. There is a death later on that raises intriguing questions, but it's a suicide, not a murder.
The real subject of the novel, perhaps, is how mysterious we are to one another and how lives are damaged, sometimes irreparably, by the gaps of comprehension. Ridgway, a Dublin author who lived in north London for more than a decade, writes these interlocking stories with the keen sense of place and lucid, pared-down prose of a good crime novel, which makes the more outlandish deviations from the genre even more arresting.
The most persistent mystery, in a book filled with unlikely tales, has to do with the reliability of the narrative itself. Is the novel a collective fantasy, a series of elaborate delusions? Is it all an extension of Hawthorn's dream in the opening pages? No clear answers are forthcoming, but that doesn't make the novel any less engaging. "Knowing things completes them. Kills them," says the publisher. "They fade away, decided and over and forgotten. Not knowing sustains us." This unusual detective story takes the wisdom of his observation on board, and runs with it.
