Ann Granger: Risking it All (2001)

Edition: Headline, 2001
Review number: 1041

In this Fran Varady novel, it is not (for once) the fault of her curiosity that she is caught up in a murder mystery. She is suddenly contacted by a private detective, who has traced her for Fran's mother. She had left Fran's father when Fran was seven and is now dying in a hospice. When Fran visits her, she is told that she has a sister, illegally adopted as a baby by a couple whose own child had died. Fran is asked to trace her too (the illegality has made Fran's mother wary of asking the investigator). But then Fran finds the body of the detective, killed in his own car only yards away from the garage in which she is temporarily living.

The Fran Varady series is by this point well established, and Risking it All has the standard features: sympathetic portrayal of a side of London not normally viewed positively by the genre; well drawn young people, again not typical of the genre; a parallel investigation by distrusted police. It is a most enjoyable series, and Risking it All fits into it like a glove.

Ann Granger: Running Scared (1998)

Edition: Headline, 1998
Review number: 512

The third Fran Varady novel continues with the themes which shaped the first two. Fran is currently working with her friend Ganesh in his uncle's corner shop. She becomes involved with crime once again when a man staggers into the shop, having managed to escape from a car in which he was being abducted. She does not immediately connect the discovery of an envelope containing a set of photographic negatives with this man, until his body turns up on the doorstep of her flat. Then she realises that this envelope is what the kidnappers were after, and that she and Ganesh are in a lot of danger.

With the discovery of the body, the police of necessity become involved, and the distrustful relationship between them and Fran has not changed. She continues to have friends among the homeless, and the them the police have always been objects of fear.

Fran is an interesting character, and the background of these novels is rather different from the vast majority of detective novels. I suspect that the series will continue to entertain for some time to come.

Ann Granger: Asking for Trouble (1997)

Edition: Headline, 1997
Review number: 320

After six or seven Mitchell and Markby novels, Ann Granger has written a detective novel outside the series, almost completely different in tone and background. Her central character, Fran Varady, is about to be thrown out of the condemned building in which she is squatting when one of the others in the house is found dead, hanging from the light fitting in her room. At first thought to be suicide, it soon becomes clear that her death is murder.

Fran starts to look into the murder partly because it soon becomes clear to her that the squatters are the main suspects, and partly because relatives of the dead girl ask her to do so. Fran is not at all like their preconceptions of a squatter; she is well spoken, well educated and from a good background; she is neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic.

This in fact brings us to the heart of the novel, which is to do with the true nature of those who live in what is frequently considered Britain's underclass. None of those who lived with Fran were particularly unusual; they were normal people who for one reason or another had ended up in a squat. Asking For Trouble is unusual among detective stories about people in this type of background in that the squatters are not stereotypes. On the other hand, the police are not attacked either, the main reasons that they come over in a bad light being institutional bureaucracy (ill equipped to deal with the rather unofficial lifestyle of the squatters), and the prejudices of individual officers. So often crime novels reinforce a right-wing view of the world, in which squatters (or New Age travellers, or the homeless) are depraved addicts, and policemen guardians of virtue, and it is nice to see a writer making them all out to be normal, imperfect people.

As well as this point in its favour, Asking for Trouble is well written, in a style which reminded me of Ruth Rendell. Granger is better at writing about young people than either Rendell or P.D. James, and so her main character is not only sympathetic but also believable.