Oh Marina Girl by Graham Lironi (Contraband)
The first thing you should notice is there is no comma in the title. There should, technically, be one between ‘Oh’ and ‘Marina’. Perhaps an exclamation mark. There isn’t because the title is an anagram. Go work it out.
That basic trickiness sums up this entire novel. It’s a puzzle, a conundrum, a brain-teasing anagram of a novel told with wit and style.
I won’t tell you much of the story because to do so risks unravelling the rope trick that is the narrative – there’s a book, a review, a reaction to said review, a kidnapping and an earlier murder which may or may not be connected to all the above.
I’ll admit freely that I approached it with some trepidation because this has all the hallmarks of – deep breath – literature, which is like garlic to my pulp vampire. However, I raced through it, delighting as each side of this particular Rubik Cube was twisted into place.
It’s a crime story but not in the mainstream sense of the genre. It has an air of unreality, like one of those crossword puzzles that uses words no-one’s ever heard of before. In reading I abandoned my usual crime writerly anality (is that a word?). It didn’t matter that the author spoke of Strathclyde Police, no longer in operation, for the exact period is never established. It’s set in Glasgow, it has scenes in the Mitchell Library and Queen’s Park and George Square and that gives it a real-life, breathing background but it doesn’t shake off the feeling that everything you read is a riddle, a Chinese box with a secret at its heart. But as a crime reader I was not disappointed by the solution.
It has all the potential of being one those novels that people talk about, rave about. A trend, a cult. In fact, it’s the most fun you can have with cult content without actually shaving your head and holing up in a compound in Idaho.
‘Oh Marina Girl’ will be launched during Aye Write. Details here