The Dangerous Stranger is the fifth story in a series featuring a pair of mis-matched detectives in Oxford, both called Wilkins. Ryan Wilkins is Oxford born and bred, white, a chav who grew up on what the Americans would call a ‘trailer park,’ badly dressed, badly behaved, semi-feral in fact, with a chip on his shoulder and anger-management issues generally brought into play by encounters with privileged elites. Ray Wilkins is a member of the privileged elites, London-Nigerian, privately educated with a double first in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, handsome, nattily dressed, articulate and suave, the golden boy of Thames Valley Police – until, much against his will, he was paired with Ryan. They are not related. They do not get on.
Oddly, what they get are results.
This new story is a thought-experiment. What if Oxford – gentle city of poets and scholars – had experienced a riot, as so many cities in the UK did, after the Southport murders? An out-of-control crowd lobbing Molotov cocktails at a hotel housing asylum seekers. And also: what if a young refugee was actually burned to death? (It’s an Oxford tradition, after all, if in abeyance for many centuries and formerly restricted to Jews and archbishops.) And furthermore: what if the victim then turned out not to be a refugee at all?
Perhaps it sounds very political. But the impulse wasn’t to discuss politics; the story seemed to arise naturally out of the anger and fear. There is action, for sure, but as Chandler said, what counts is emotion; and it seemed to me that there were unusual amounts of this arising, unstoppably, chaotically, from the basic situation I imagined.
This emotion affects all the characters, in different ways. Because it’s the fifth book in a series, some of the characters have naturally been around for a while. Little Ryan, for instance, Ryan’s four-year-old son. And his father, Ryan Senior, released early from prison (overcrowding issues) and now resident, to his disgust, in a hostel for rehabilitating prisoners. The Wilkins’s Superintendent is familiar too, fresh, steely and blonde as ever, but having to cope with a disciplinary enquiry, which tests her considerable reserves to the limit, and the Chief Constable, a massive, battered, malevolent presence, who openly hopes to get rid of those Wilkins ‘clowns’.
But there are new characters too. A sly criminal from Rotherhithe who hates Oxford even as his job keeps him there. An eager new DC, William, who simply won’t shut up and is a little too naïve for his own good. ‘Milky’ Nolan, twelve years old, excited to find himself at his first riot. Yemi Kosoko, world food grocery shopkeeper in Oxford’s ethnic Cowley Road and his friend, the chess-playing eccentric academic Nicholas Kinghorn, who dyes his beard lilac to remind him of weddings in Ghana. And finally, most important of all, Jallo (other names unknown, age unknown, country of origin unknown) who finds himself sleeping rough in Oxford’s nooks and crannies, and knows himself to be in horrible danger.
I like Oxford’s nooks and crannies, I must admit. I like the city’s double nature. Its deep Englishness (dons and quadrangles, meadows and river), and simultaneous air of foreignness (all those foreign post-grads, language students and care workers). I like its strange blend of permanence (we who live here) and transience (those who arrive and go, students, tourists). And I like its rooted elderly and great waves of youth. It seems to me excitingly unstable. Perhaps it’s that quality that gives rise to stories, not all of which it wants to tell.
The Dangerous Man by Simon Mason (Quercus Publishing) £16.99 Out Now
On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.
The Shots review of The Dangerous Man can be found here.
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