Recommending books and Joseph Knox

Imposter Syndrome by Joseph Knox

published 2024

 

 

Quite often people, on hearing that I write about books & culture on this blog and for the i newspaper, ask me for recommendations for themselves or for gifts, particularly a new crime author they haven’t tried. I know, what can they be thinking? Why would they ask me – oh I know, because I have written blogposts on more than 2000 books here at Clothes in Books.

I ask them a few questions about what they like, what kind of thing they are looking for, and then say what I planned from the beginning: ‘Ellie Griffith, or Mick Herron’ if they want crime.

[Lissa Evans,Amanda Craig, Hilary McKay if they would like to read a novel - all frequently featured, click on tags at the end of the post]

Ellie Griffiths, and particularly her Ruth Galloway series, have been fixtures on the blog since the beginning. My favourite crime series, favourite heroine, and the thinking woman’s policeman – Harry Nelson. You can read about her and her books all over the blog.  And she has written the end of the Ruth Galloway books, though her other series continue.

If the call was more for spy fiction, my automatic response was Mick Herron, author of the Slow Horses books (and also the Zoe Boehm books). I could ask a ton of questions (‘man or woman? Like spies, like crime, like…’.) and Mick Herron was always the answer.

But now everyone knows about Herron because of the Apple TV series, and I guess they are all reading the books now? (and the Zoe Boehm books are also being dramatized on screen) Here are some pictures of the series being shot: for exteriors they use the actual location of Slough House as described in the books, a place I happen to know well. 

Every so often there are massive days of filming (‘Mr Oldman will be along shortly’) and a hilarious set of events in which the street on a Saturday (a very quiet day in the City of London) is made to look like a normal wet Thursday with the help of (I’m guessing) very expensive hired buses, taxis, cars and fire engines producing the rain.

what the location looks like on a Saturday normally...

... this looks normal, but is actually set up for filming

And I do still wholly recommend the books, several on the blog.

But maybe I need a new recommendation answer, and it might be Joseph Knox. His last novel True Crime Story, came out in 2021 – I read about it somewhere a year later, thought it sounded appealing, downloaded it. It was very clever and entertaining, complete fiction but pretending to be a meta-investigation. A really good read.

My records tell me that I read his other three books within the next week, which is startling and was fairly unprecedented. I think 10 days from downloading the first to finishing the fourth: I read his entire oeuvre. I recommended them to various people, and gave True Crime Story as a present to people. All four books were set in Manchester. The first three are a series starring a maverick cop, Aiden Waits: Sirens, The Smiling Man & The Sleepwalker. One of them I described in my notes as ‘gruesome, miserable, bloodthirsty, but absolutely compelling’.

There would be one quite reasonable question here, which is: why is there no mention of Joseph Knox on the blog? There is an answer: this was Sept 2022, and both the Queen and Hilary Mantel died, and I was reviewing some big new books that month (Osman and Galbraith) for the i newspaper, and also writing about the deaths, and about Royal books – five pieces that month. They pay me, you-all don’t.

So I’ve been waiting ever since for him to write another book, and here it is, Impostor Syndrome, another standalone, and it is as good as ever.

It starts in a very classic, if niche, style: someone mistakes the first-person narrator for someone else. Within pages he’s been asked to stand in for the person he resembles. He’s at a pretty low point, it’s obvious something as-yet-unspecified has gone wrong in his life, so he agrees.

Here he is getting some clothes

The tailor had kept Heydon’s preferred styles and measurements on file, and it saves me a lot of questions I can’t answer, about custom fabrics, pockets, pleats and lapels. In the end, I’m wearing a slim, darker than navy blue, single-breasted suit. When I show Reagan, she smiles, but my sense is she can’t quite see it. She pays, and arranges for the finished article to be sent to my hotel.

[Suit from Moss Bros]

It’s a trope, but one that grabs me every time – I have done a number of posts on impersonation. And to be fair, the first attempt falls apart quite quickly, so maintaining a connection with real life and likely outcomes, while opening up a solid, complex and breathtaking plot which keeps twisting and turning…. He comes across a character with the excellent  name of Vincent Control, and uncovers a whole strange world. Control is ‘dressed stylishly, somewhere between a goth and a Teddy boy’, so this was the best I could do (from All Saints).

 

It’s  just a great book, a joy to read if occasionally gruesome. And I can’t say much about it for fear of spoilers.

Brilliantly compelling and absorbing, slightly confused ending, but superb.