In At the Deep End by Anabel Donald: the 90s in all their glory

 

In at the Deep End by Anabel Donald

published 1994

&

Uncommon Murder by Anabel Donald

published 1992

 

There are a number of writers from, say, 1990 – 2005 who have dipped from view and didn’t get the attention they deserved at the time. Crime and non-crime, mostly women. I’ve recently written about Jane Stevenson, there’s Sarah Caudwell and Marissa Piesman. Anabel Donald has written a lot of books in her time, over a long period, but her Notting Hill crime series from the 1990s are the ones I remember: I read them all avidly at the time.

This was the second one, and Alex Tanner, TV researcher and private investigator, is the heroine. She wasn’t really breaking new ground (whatever people claim: there were books about female investigators back then) – she was a woman who had pulled herself up from a childhood in care, chippy, narky, fierce, a bit annoying, uninterested in her clothes. She has been asked to investigate the death of a golden youth in a posh boys’ school, and uses a potential TV documentary as her cover.

But in this one she has an excellent assistant in Claudia who is very different, and a thorn in Alex’s side, but brings her own talents to the case:

Claudia says: ‘The Major’s got a heart condition.’

‘How do you know?’

‘When I went to the loo I check through their medicine cabinet and made a list. Glyceryl trinitrate -its for angina. My grandfather has it – and then there’s Prempak-C, that’s hormone replacement –‘

‘Does your grandfather take that too?’

‘No, Kate O’Mara I think – or maybe Mrs Thatcher – I read about it in Cosmo…’

‘Why did you look in the medicine cabinet?’

‘Oh I always do. It tells you so much about people… yours did. No proper facial care.’

‘What?’

‘I recommend the Clinique range, but perhaps you should consider Elizabeth Arden. My mother swears by it, for the older skin.’

I very much enjoyed their relationship, which was far from the standard partnership banter.

The clothes are great – Claudia wears Naf Naf jeans, absolutely correct, but then also Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, which I think were more popular among older women at that time. (Photos of Gloria Vanderbilt herself feature on the blog occasionally because I found a stash of them at the Library of Congress and find them mesmerising – see here and here)

There is a startling makeover scene later: Alex’s friend Polly is devastated by a break-up with a man, and in a convoluted manner ends up in the same bar as him, but dressed in low-rent clothes and very much not looking her best. She is going to have to go past the wretched chap to leave, but can’t face doing so while looking awful. So Alex takes her to the ladies’ room. They cut off her worn baggy jeans to make short shorts, they hack at the t-shirt to create a tight cropped top, they tie up her hair with pink condoms from the machine (a step too far in my view) and use burnt matches as eyeliner. Then they borrow a very handsome waiter as her escort, and ‘she strutted her stuff along the catwalk of Westbourne Park Rd, every eye in the place following her’, including of course the bad ex. The whole thing is completely unreal, but great fun, and actually is cleverly linked up with a later plot development, nicely following through.

So, good clothes, and good interesting detection. Good writing – I liked lines like ‘He’d be all over it like a winter-weight duvet’.

Alex has the usual on/off boyfriend, a TV producer called Barty, who actually comes over as a charming person, and there is a splendid scene where the three of them (Alex, Barty, Claudia) watch a recording of a French TV programme together looking for clues and being very funny. ‘The secrets of her heart are to be shared with 3 million viewers’ says the programme presenter.

‘He’ll be lucky, 3-million viewers’ says Barty.

So very much of its time (no computers or mobiles or internet) but in a good way, and a very enjoyable read.

Naturally I went to my favourite resource for this era - Old Ralph Lauren Adverts: Archive (tumblr.com). Top picture and third picture. (Perhaps the reason I am rediscovering these 90s ish (+/- 10) books is actually so I can use more of these pictures.)

I also re-read the first in the series: Uncommon Murder (1992) in which Alex Tanner investigates a crime from 30 years before, along with a missing girl now. Her buddy/enemy/helper in this one is an older lady who isn’t quite what she seems, and there’s an interesting connection with Kenya.

One complaint: when I talked about fancy dress recently, I said that a great crime was to trail and promise a fancy dress party in a murder story and then for it never to appear, or to be under-used. In this book, a murder takes place at a Hunt Ball  – a great favourite of mine, as featured here and here – so I had high hopes of a setpiece scene at this late 50s event, with long clothes descriptions. But sadly it is barely touched on, very much in the background, and no decent clothes. Tchah. 

Alex herself, our chief sleuth, does not dress in anything smart: this is more like her:

Uncommon Murder is still another good read, although part of the ending-solution is so horrible that it had lived in my mind in all the succeeding 30 years and I quite didn’t want to read it again. But overall it’s a good example of the crime-in-the-past genre.