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Last night was another insomniac one, so I charged ahead with the latest book I've been reading, Daggerman (1980) by Richard H. Francis, and to my surprise finished it. I even started the next book on my list . . .
The name Richard H. Francis (the "H." added to avoid any possible confusion with the very different writer Dick Francis) may not ring too many bells. I read his first novel, Blackpool Vanishes, around the time it was published, in 1979; it was offered to the (UK) Science Fiction Book Club, whose editor, while I was commissioning books from the likes of Dave Langford for David & Charles, had his office across the passage from mine, heh heh. Blackpool Vanishes is a strangely wonderful piece of odd semi-surrealist quirkiness which tends to be lumped in with science fiction because, yes, it does use some sf tropes and, well, where else would you put it? It's actually a very bad fit with the genre.
I'm kind of ashamed, bearing in mind how much I reveled in Francis's first novel, that it's taken me the best part of thirty years to get round to reading his second, Daggerman. (He has some others, I noticed during a trawl through amazon.co.uk yesterday, but only his first two seem to have been published in the US.) My impression is that this novel, too, has tended to be lumped in with a genre it doesn't at all fit, in this instance the serial-killer thriller -- of which it would be, come to think of it, an extremely early example. To be true, it does have a serial killer in it, and a (smaller than you might think) part of the book is concerned with the terrorization of the community and the police efforts to catch him. But that's rather like saying The Wizard of Oz is a book about witchcraft.
Costford is a town somewhere in the Peak District, in the northish of England. A man called Turner is simultaneously bilked out of his job and ejected from his marriage, and the strain of his life collapsing is enough to cause a complete mental eruption. He becomes Daggerman, one of the oddest serial killers you'll find anywhere. But this is just the bit of the novel that gives the blurb writer something to latch onto. What the novel is more truly about is Costford and its inhabitants -- or, really, the inhabitants of any small town anywhere. Unknown to Daggerman himself and generally even to his victims, all the people he attacks are tied in to each other. In a sense, the story is that of the survivors discovering the hitherto unsuspected connections between themselves -- which connections cause some of them to graft purposeful motives onto what are in reality near-random crimes. All this is in the context of a community that reminded me considerably of the Flaxborough stalwarts in Colin Watson's long series of novels which did for the detective story what Terry Pratchett later did for fantasy.
In fact, that's the part of Daggerman that may seem least expected: perhaps more than anything else, it's a comedy of manners that kept me grinning much of the while; I even laughed aloud several times, which is something few books make me do.
I imagine I'll be reading Daggerman again sometime. In the meanwhile, I must sort out some means of picking up copies of Francis's later novels next time I'm in the UK . . .
