Book Review: The Coroner by M R Hall

The Coroner
M R Hall
(My copy Pan-McMillan, 2009)

Clearing up the caseload left by her predecessor newly appointed Severn Vale District Coroner Jenny Cooper draws a link between the death in custody of a troubled young man and the seeming suicide of a teenage prostitute that may connect both deaths with shady dealings in high places. Add to that her rapidly unravelling personal life and she is all too soon walking a deadly tightrope from which, it seems, the authorities would be only too happy to see her fall.

The Coroner is M R Hall’s first novel, he was previously a barrister and then a screen writer, and is proof that the intelligent crime novel is alive and well as a strand in modern British fiction.

The tone is downbeat and his knowledge of the law, and more pointedly of how the legal profession works behind the scenes, gives the book a welcome ring of authenticity. His prose style has a distinctly documentary feel, at several points the book reads like an above average piece of true crime writing that keeps the plot moving along when legal details threaten to slow things down.

In Jenny Cooper Hall has created a series character with just the right mix of determination and vulnerability, not to mention a private life filled with enough conflicts to provide a dozen sub plots, to sustain several novels before the law of diminishing returns comes into play.

Hall’s masterstroke though lies in using a coroner, the official charged with certifying deaths under British law and investigating the cause of those that appear suspicious, as his protagonist. This allows him to view what could have been a rather familiar story from a different, and to my knowledge, original perspective and to deal with ideas about justice that might not otherwise have been addressed.

In this way The Coroner is a quietly political book in that it examines through the corruption, inefficiency and petty vanities of minor public servants a system that consistently fails those people at the bottom of the societal heap, drawing a conclusion that sees a sort of justice done but refuses to let the system itself off the hook for its failings.