Confession Is Good For The Soul – A Death’s Door Story

His editor had pinged over an email enquiring as to the expected submission date regarding his latest review for The Crime Writer. Mulding-Spalcock was once again behind schedule, his personal life consuming energies that had been enthusiastically, yet clandestinely redirected from his literary obligations. Our reviewer would enjoy penning this particular article, its subject matter chiming a gruesome chord buried within his deformed soul, though artfully muffled by the foolish veneer he wore with concealed hubris.
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Without Proof, All Murderers Are Anonymous by Heather Blakely

- “Confession is good for the soul”

The whodunnit genre calls for the masterful utilisation of hallowed Golden Tropes lacing the venerated pages of the genre’s apocryphal founding fathers and four queens. As with any novel, accepted architectonic considerations undergird our necessarily nefarious capers, however this formulaic approach can produce results as dull as they are woefully contrived. Heather Blakely’s latest instalment in her hugely popular murder mystery series, Hiding in Plain Sight has been published this month by Reaper’s House and sports the polysemic title, Without Proof, All Murderers Are Anonymous.

The novel’s plot is essentially predicated upon the notion that a suspect least likely to be guilty of a series of ever more savage murders decides to confess to his crimes, but in an elliptical fashion designed to cathartically cleanse his malfeasant soul, sans the inconvenience of any punitive ramifications whatsoever. A premise loaded with a real dash of visceral vicariousness for any reader with a guilty conscience!

Blakely pulls off her literary objectives with the legerdemain of one who both understands the leitmotifs of her genre and the nature of mankind’s darkest urges. She seeds her twisting plot with moments all too likely to resonate with her avid and perhaps knowing reader. For this reviewer, I experienced a palpable sense of verisimilitude as our chief protagonist performed his devilishly disguised game of deadly deceit. Blakely’s prose perfectly capturing the psyche and persona of a murderer intent on bloodshed, yet artfully eschewing any obvious association with such deeds. My favourite passage runs thus …

“He pulled the blade across Dorothy’s exposed throat, slicing deeply into her wrinkled flesh with the detached precision of a surgeon, spliced through with the white-hot lust of a madman devoutly worshipping at the altar of unhinged barbarity. As Dorothy’s frail body bucked violently, pulling on the taut ropes holding her fast to the dining-room chair, her blood splashed Pollock-like on the bay window’s panes, sliding down the dirty glass to pool in a viscose puddle beside her writing bureau.

Silencing the bitch’s plaintiff screams had been his primary objective, forcing her to die in a maelstrom of impuissant fear, the icing on the proverbial cake. He’d clean the glistening knife and leave the scene littered with clues…a trail of false leads all pointing to an entirely innocent, cleverly framed perpetrator”.

We understand our murderer’s motives, we empathise with his callous apportioning of underserved blame to another. Murdering another soul must be rendered with sincerity for the reader to accept the scintillating horror of the moment, and not insouciantly turn the page in pursuit of a premature denouement. For me, Blakely adroitly captures the nuanced bliss of taking a life, whilst wishing the act was both public, and unequivocally acknowledged.

Pity the poor murderer who skulks unseen within the penumbra of anonymous evil and cannot bath in the joyous delights of deserved revulsion. It is this carefully calibrated note that lends Blakely’s tale its potency transforming a bog-standard whodunnit into something far more relatable and resonantly refractive. Echoing Chekhov, Blakely has given her characters not the semblance of verisimilitude, but the solidity of mutilated humanistic truth.

Though perhaps senile beyond my years, I found her dénouement to be no less invigorating than Countess Bathory’s infamous bathing habits. Blakely assiduously weaves the multi-hued threads of her meticulously manufactured plot into a moment of delicious confession. As my rapacious eyes were drawn to the final sentence, a heart long since enervated by life’s quotidian humdrum, beat with the urgency of a man half my age. Blakely perfectly captured the thrill of ending another’s tenure on this mortal coil and the life-enhancing joy of doing so, without regret or fear.

The old and perhaps hackneyed adage goes that an author should write about what they know…but for the concession that Blakely’s imagination is only rivalled by her dextrously modulated prose, I would have to assume that our author has indeed killed in real life…and enjoyed doing so. Few modern scribes penning works within this form really articulate the blissful ecstasy of taking a human life. Fortunately for her readers, I can wholeheartedly assure all who encounter her latest book, that whilst Blakely may have given us a magnificently malefic fiction, Picasso’s words ring true with the force of a sonorous bell…

“Art is the lie that helps us see the truth…”.