Book Review- Game Set and Murder

Game, Set and Murder

Elizabeth Flynn

(Lion, 2013)

Wimbledon on the eve of the world’s most famous tennis tournament, a setting crying out to play host to an old style British murder mystery. It’s finally been made one in Elizabeth Flynn’s debut novel with the discovery of the body of a former champion found on Court 19 providing a challenging case for DI Costello; herself something of an ingénue when it comes to murder.

If your idea of a good way to pass an afternoon is settling down with a golden age mystery novel, then Game, Set and Murder is a book you should put on your reading list. That, I hasten to add, is not in any way a criticism since you are sure to enjoy the experience.

Flynn touches all the right bases, constructing a plot that combines conflicting motivations, old secrets and live resentments within the confines of a closed community. In the engaging Costello she has created a dogged investigator refreshingly free of the angst and addictions that afflict many modern fictional sleuths. She is in many ways the great-granddaughter of the stolidly decent coppers John Mills and Jack Warner used to play in fifties B movies.

If you tend to use words like ‘gritty’ and ‘realistic’ when listing your requirements for a good piece of crime fiction then this is not the book for you because it aspires to be neither. Never mind, there are plenty of other books you can choose from, each one brimming with gruesome autopsy scenes and a host of comforting clichés about how awful life is out there on the mean streets.

On the other hand if what you’re looking for is a satisfyingly diverting mystery that ties up all the loose ends and has beneath its light surface a quietly moral, though never moralistic, core, then this is the book for you.

I doubt Game, Set and Murder will ever trouble the executives who schedule television adaptations, it is in most respects the antithesis of the ‘grim is good’ sensibility to which they have been wedded for the past couple of decades. It would though make for a superb afternoon play on Radio Four; to its likely target audience there could be no higher recommendation of its quality.