Book review: Throw Me to the Wolves, by Patrick McGuinness

Agatha Christie’s novels were rarely more than 50,000 words long. Simenon’s were even shorter. But what was good enough for them isn’t for crime writers, their publishers and – I suppose – readers today. Crime fiction is big business and the books swell accordingly. Patrick McGuinness’s second novel is no more than a middle-distance runner by today’s standards, but it is still too long, too long by at least a hundred pages. There’s a very good novel inside this one, and if it is not quite smothered, it is because the author is intelligent.He is also a poet which makes his disdain for economy surprising and an academic which – perhaps – explains it. One should add that, though the narrator is a policeman investigating a case, this isn’t a police procedural. Indeed, I would guess that a policeman proceeding in the narrator’s way would soon be shunted into administration. This doesn’t matter. Novelists are rightly granted a deal of latitude.