1989, an Allie Burns novel by Val McDermid, is set in (wait for it) the 1989. The cover features the image of a cassette tape, which reminds us (or at least me) that 1989 was a year of technological as well as political and societal change. The book features many amusing throwbacks to brick sized cell phones, green screen computers and fax machines. I was 24 that year, working for a producer of made for TV movies, another relic that no longer exists.
But, the book… Val McDermid has been hailed as the “Queen of Crime” by critics. I am not sure I would bestow this title on her, though the book has a few things going for it. 1989 is the second in a series of books featuring Allie Burns, an investigative reporter in Manchester, England. She’s Scottish, but she and her life partner, Rona, left Scotland after a shakeup at the newspaper chain where Allie works.
Allie doesn’t like her job very much. She’s used to writing high impact investigative pieces, but the paper’s new owner, Ace Lockhart, a character who resembles Robert Maxwell so much it’s an insult to thin veils to say he’s anyone else. He might as well be called Norbert Haxwell. He’s cut the paper down to nothing and closed the investigations unit. He kept Allie on, and she’s supposed to feel grateful, but she’s seething. Her assignments are uniformly titillating tabloid crap. She hates herself for doing it.
1989 leads off with a man planning to murder Lockhart. The story then takes significant time following Allie as she pursues a story about the AIDS epidemic. She turns in a story about AIDS patients being treated like pariahs, but Lockhart’s hack editors rewrite it to make the AIDS patients seem like victims of their own sinfulness—burning Allie’s reputation with her sources.
In this first part of the book, we see a lot of her life with Rona, which was not exactly scandalous in 1989, but certainly not as normalized as lesbian relationships are today. Allie doesn’t speak with her parents, for example, as they deem her lifestyle immoral.
We also get to know Genevieve Lockhart, who I am assuming is a stand-in for the notorious Ghislaine Maxwell, though I don’t know her story well enough to say. She’s a complicated character, at once striving for independence while kissing her father’s enormous rear end. She runs Pythagoras Press, a company that bears a striking resemblance to Pergamon Press, Maxwell’s original business.
McDermid is a fine writer, but I will say that it takes quite a while to get to the crime and suspense part of the book. To this, I must confess that I am not the intended reader for this book. As a man, I don’t find discussions about hairstyles, lesbian relationships, and padded shoulder suits to be all that interesting, so perhaps it’s not fair for me to judge the 100+ pages of run up to the actual plot of the book.
Once the story gets rolling, the book is quite engaging. McDermid takes you behind the Berlin Wall into East Germany, as well into the thrilling and worrisome pre-revolutionary state of eastern Europe in 1989. There are multiple mystery threads to pull on, and you find yourself wanting Allie to get to the bottom of it all. You also get treated to some edge-of-your seat cloak and dagger sequences featuring the East German Stasi and other dubious characters.
Robert Maxwell died in suspicious circumstances in 1991. He was found floating face up off the coast of the Canary Islands, a few miles from his yacht. If you know this, you’re waiting for Lockhart’s death, which is preordained on page two. McDermid has laid a trap for herself this way as a suspense author. There isn’t a lot of suspense in this department, and you can sort of see what’s coming from pretty far away.
For a certain kind of reader, however, I can see how this book would be an enjoyable read.