The Mercy Seat

Carrying not coals to Newcastle, but hard-boiled, U.S.-style crime
Apr 12, 2006

The Mercy Seat
By Martyn Waites
Pegasus. 421 pp. $25
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke

Ask anyone who has heard of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to name the connection with the city that springs to mind, and in all likelihood the reply will feature the soccer team Newcastle United; or the "lovable rogue" Geordies epitomized by the TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; or Get Carter starring Michael Caine - possibly Britain's most famous and hardest-boiled gangster movie until The Long Good Friday (itself usurped by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels).

It is this territory that is claimed by Martyn Waites in his new novel, The Mercy Seat. Originally from Newcastle, Waites has lived mostly in London as an actor (playing villains, usually), and turned to writing novels some years ago. He is an admirer of such U.S. crime-fiction writers as James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Andrew Vacchs, and Sara Paretsky, and aims to bring their approach to a particular place in Britain. He has chosen Newcastle as a counterpart to the Chicago of Paretsky, the New York of Vacchs, the L.A. of Michael Connelly.

The Mercy Seat has multiple plot strands: The main character is an ex-journalist called Joe Donovan whose young son disappeared some time in the past, and who as a consequence has left his job and gone to live in depressed seclusion and squalor in a small, isolated cottage in the north of the country.

Another strand concerns a young "rent boy," Jamal, who has stolen a tape that everyone, including a man with a sapphire embedded in his front tooth, is desperate to get back. Then there are the mysteries of the missing scientist; of what two strange surveillance agents are up to; of why the newspaper's lawyer is so keen for Joe to come out of his self-imposed retirement to help find a missing colleague. Atmosphere is provided both by Waites' knowledge of the geographical area, and by his strong writing about the unhappy lives and histories of abandoned and abused children living on the streets.

The last (and only) book of Waites' that I read was his first novel, Mary's Prayer. In many ways the earlier book is a rehearsal for The Mercy Seat, featuring similar plot, characters and themes. But while Mary's Prayer was stilted, cliched and unbelievable, The Mercy Seat convinces. Until about halfway through, it is readable enough but nothing special. But at the beginning of part 3, it gets you. It's a fantastic and rare moment: You can feel the author's grip tightening, the emotions driving various characters weaving the plot into cohesion. Thankfully, the final revelation of the core "mystery," so often the stumbling block for this type of fiction, seems realistic (in context) and believable.

Is Newcastle really the dangerous place depicted by Waites, replete with drug dealers, child abusers, corrupt police and thugs not shy about beating anyone up at the drop of a hat - or using the eponymous mercy seat (from the song by Johnny Cash about the death-row prisoner)? Well, I don't know. You wouldn't know it to go there, but then if you went to Nottingham you wouldn't see what John Harvey's Resnik sees; Rebus' Edinburgh is a perception of Ian Rankin; and London's seamier side is the territory of so many writers that one is surprised not to be constantly tripping over last night's bodies on the way to work in the morning.But the important feature of Waites' environment is that the reader can suspend disbelief and be carried along by the plot (which has a few holes, but I'm not complaining). And, as in the very best crime fiction, one can "learn" something on the journey. Events may be exaggerated, but in the process Waites highlights injustices from his personal knowledge of offenders in prison, victims of child abuse, and socially excluded teenagers.I'm glad that Joe Donovan will return in a sequel, The Bone Machine, next year.

Maxine Clarke is a crime-fiction enthusiast who lives in Surrey, England. She is an editor at the scientific journal Nature. Visit her blog, Petrona, at http://petrona-maxine.blogspot.com/.

This review was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.