Review of Mark Billingham's In the Dark
Cleverly Plotted Crime Novel From the Creator of DI Tom Thorne
Apr 6, 2009
Since the publication of his first novel in 2001, former stand-up comedian Mark Billingham has sold hundreds of thousands of crime thrillers, each featuring his London detective Tom Thorne. His latest bestseller, In the Dark, remains in the capital, but this time Billingham has produced a stand-alone book with a cast of new characters.
Gang Warfare in London
The action begins on a hot August night. In the early hours of the morning, a carload of young gang members go after a seemingly random victim – shots are fired, and a life is lost. Helen Weeks, heavily pregnant and with plenty of worries of her own, begins the long and difficult process of unravelling exactly what happened on that fateful summer night, and why. What she uncovers is a trail of violence - not all of it caused by the gangs - and of corruption, some of which is uncomfortably close to home.
The novel alternates between several characters, a clever ploy that means the reader’s sympathies are continually pulled in different directions. Many of the gang members are uncaring, heartless thugs for whom casual violence is a way of life, but Billingham is careful not to fall into the trap of lazy stereotyping – young Theo, with a girlfriend and baby at home, struggles to reconcile his conscience with the gang’s acts of violence, despite his own increasingly unwilling part in them.
The novel does at first feel rather bitty, with the separate strands of narrative linking the presence of DI Thorne to hold everything together. Once the plotlines start to converge though, the action moves seamlessly from one part of London to the next, and the twist at the end is genuinely shocking – no mean feat in a crime novel such as this.
The novel also makes it painfully clear how easily teenagers can find themselves lured into a life of gang warfare, driven by desire for status and respect, egging each other on to ever greater acts of violence. When a peripheral gang member is shot dead in a revenge attack, the reader is shocked to be reminded that he was only sixteen years old.
Theakston's Old Peculier Award
Billingham is an award-winning writer – he won the 2003 Sherlock Award for Best Detective created by a British writer for DI Thorne, and was also awarded the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award for best crime novel of the year. On this kind of form, a few more prizes might just be coming his way.
In The Dark by Mark Billingham is published in the UK in paperback by Sphere (2009), ISBN 978-0-7515-3993-6.
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