View source for The Killing of Polly Carter by Robert Thorogood

{{infobox1
|title=The Killing of Polly Carter
|sort=Killing of Polly Carter
|author=Robert Thorogood
|reviewer= Lesley Mason
|genre=Crime
|summary= Enjoyable murder mystery set on the Caribbean Isle of Saint Marie familiar from the ''Death in Paradise'' television series.
|rating=4
|buy=Maybe
|borrow=Yes
|pages=368
|publisher=MIRA
|date=December 2015
|isbn= 978-1848454156
|website= https://twitter.com/robthor
|video=lcTXGCc15JQ
|cover=1848454155
|aznuk=1848454155
|aznus=1848454155
}}
I'm a fan of old-school murder mysteries…think [[:Category:Agatha Christie|Agatha Christie]], think [[:Category:Margery Allingham|Margery Allingham]], Dorothy Sayers… These are stories as games.  Usually on the very edge of plausibility, gruesomeness kept to a minimum, police procedure trodden all over in hobnailed enthusiasm of insight and flashes of inspiration.  So it follows that I enjoy TV series in the same vein: Midsommer Murders, Poirot… and Death in Paradise. It was because my enjoyment of the series was known that ''The Killing of Polly Carter'' was sent my way. 

For those who don't know the series – and haven't come across Thorogood's books (this is the second) – the Paradise in question is the Caribbean Island of Saint Marie.  It is everything a certain type of Brit would want a Caribbean island to be: hot, steamy, sort of French-African in atmosphere, but an outpost of the British Commonwealth such that for some reason we're responsible for policing it.  Ok, it's got a murder rate that might put you off visiting, but generally the murderers aren't locals.  So that's alright then. 

In a way the island stands in for the English Country House in the Christie genre.  They're not exactly locked-room mysteries, but not far from. 

No apologies for talking about the series because that's where the books originate.  Thorogood is the show's creator so it is all is own work, and maybe therefore he's allowed to back-track in the novels.  Fans of the show will know that Richard Poole is no longer with us… and his replacement Humphrey Goodman is a very different character altogether.  To my mind he's also the more sympathetic, but that's another story. 

For now we're back in Saint Marie's history with DI Poole at the helm, resolutely wearing his dark wool suit and tie (because that's how DI's dress), plotting the downfall of Harry the gecko that shares his rickety home, and – on this occasion – ever so slightly panicked because his mother is coming to visit.  This is not the sort of thing Richard Poole's mother does.  Not alone.  Not on a whim.  He's worried. 

He can't think about all that now though… because Polly Carter is dead.  Apparently the party-girl supermodel who everyone thought was finally clean and detoxed and sorting out her life seems to have thrown herself off a cliff. 

Of course, it's not suicide and it doesn't take long for Richard to figure that out.  Finding out who killed her, and why, proves a little more tricky.  There's the usual set of alibis, half-alibis and lies.  Motives which don't really work. No opportunity. Cell-phones in the chandelier and bugs under the beds.  And a mysterious individual in a bright yellow raincoat. Maybe. 

There is a risk that you will enjoy this book.  I say risk, because if you do, it will be a guilt-tinged pleasure.  You will know that really, you should be above this sort of thing.  Not only should you be able to see the twists coming, you should be able to the name the older stories from which they've been borrowed.  I kept wondering if this was literally a 'book of the show' – I wondered if I'd actually seen this one televised, so clearly did it echo. 

So far as I can tell, it hasn't and it is an 'original' story… except, so many of the devices have been deployed before by Thorogood himself possibly, by others certainly.  I won't name the derivations, because maybe making those links is part of the fun. 

And yet…!   And yet, I did enjoy it.  The author's light touch is what lifts it above the mediocre.  Of course, the familiarity of Dwayne, Fidel and Camille allow him not to waste time on characterisation.  There are deft character sketches of Richard's parents though, which tell you everything you'll ever need to know as to why he turned out the way he did. 

As you'd expect from a screenwriter it's heavy on dialogue (not that the dialogue is heavy), light on everything else, which keeps the pace moving along. 

It's all done with tongue firmly in cheek.  Any book which opens with a passing parrot crapping in the DI's breakfast tea is not a book that is going to take itself seriously, and so we shouldn't either.   Of course Camille is 'burnished bronze in the sunlight' – but don't expect too much of the romantic picturesque, it's only there to offset Richard's view of himself ''his skin, he knew, was probably most like an old bar of soap you'd expect to find lurking at the bottom of a washbag: entirely worn out, dull, and not so much white as being absent of colour…[except maybe not that but rather] like when you remove the pastry lid to a nice steak and kidney pie and see that the underside of the pastry is still uncooked and pale, but steaming''. 

It's silly, and whilst the plot is not remotely likely, it does have internal logic and in the correct tradition of the genre is deducible.  

If you like the style we can also recommend [[The Herring In The Library by L C Tyler]]. 

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