Notting Hill Mysteries and Anabel Donald's London

 

The Loop by Anabel Donald

published 1996

Having recently read and blogged on two of Anabel Donald’s books, I ended up reading all  her crime stories. I seem to have been writing about London a lot lately, and this is another series where the city plays a big part – Val McDermid is quoted as saying about the books ‘Brings the London of the 90s vividly to life in this fast absorbing read’, and that’s a good description.

But then – The Loop takes heroine Alex Turner, TV researcher and private eye, to Chicago for the first part of the story, though she is soon back in London. She gets involved in a missing person case: a pregnant woman has lost the love of her life. She is dressed in ‘grey leggings and Nikes under a floppy pink sweater’ 

(big jumpers by Marc Jacobs) ‘I passed her a handful of missing-man-size paper tissues.’ It’s an intricate story, but proper missing person, I really enjoyed the tracking down. Was it possible he has just ditched the woman, or is there something else going on?

Back in the UK Alex chases after him, and all kinds of interesting byways crop up, including fundamentalist religion and a sideways look at sex workers. And there are characters who could come straight out of Alan Bennett or Victoria Wood.

Alex has an assistant, Nick (not to my mind as much fun as Claudia from In at the Deep End) whom she has helped rescue from the streets. Nick mostly works on missing kids – ‘many of them come to the London streets, where Nick swims like an unthreatened fish.’

There is also Alex’s ditzy friend Polly, the ex-model, who hopes Alex will get married to someone she (Polly) likes, so that ‘when the children come and I visit, then he won’t mind if I’m in the house when he gets home, and he won’t make those faces like, get your awful friend out of here, can’t I have a drink in peace?’

‘You’re taking too much for granted’ Alex replies, but I thought it was hilariously recognizable.

At one point she encounters two men wearing ‘black rough-looking serge trousers tucked in to long black leather boots, white collarless shirts and long black waistcoats, the sort of all-purpose ‘not-contemporary’ costumes the RSC use for minor characters’. I may not have been able to find a picture, but I think we can all recognize that.

In a previous book there was an excellent moment where the investigators watch a video together, looking for clues, and a similarly enjoyable scene turns up here, and Donald gives it full rein. It’s actually a porno film, and they are seeing who they can recognize…

There are regular clothes descriptions throughout:

He was dressed like a graduate student – red and blue plaid flannel shirt, brown corduroy trousers, tweed jacket

Well-cut black wool slacks, an expensive-looking cream sweater with patterns of gold thread,  and almost enough chunky gold jewellery to buy the bungalow.

Alex is always on the verge of being over-annoying, but just about holds on. When I wrote about female investigators in a piece for the i newspaper about the True Detective TV series, I said this: ‘She was good at sleuthing, bad at life – six words that could be the tagline for almost every fictional detective, male or female. Along with “not a people-pleaser”, also widely applicable..’

And that fits right in here.

I also read Anabel Donald’s The Glass Ceiling (1994), a very entertaining look at a group of feminists from the 1980s. Their lives have gone in very different directions, and now they are facing potential trouble. Alex investigates.

And, Destroy Opened, 1999, which I think is, sadly, the last of what were called The Notting Hill Mysteries. A man who has died and left an envelope among his possessions – guess what it says on the front? And the possibility of a very sinister serial killer at loose locally. The two cases tie together, giving us a very good book indeed.

As well as my usual Ralph Lauren adverts, I thought I’d go for another icon of the 1990s: The United Colours of Benetton…

dear golden | vintage: Search results for benetton