Last to Leave is Eddie Dellar who stumbles out of the family home as it burns to the ground. Or is he? To his mother's horror, while Eddie languishes in a coma, his twin sister, Jessica cannot be accounted for after the fire. And then a body is found in the embers. With evidence of arson, the aggressive behaviour of elderly Claudia who likes to rule the family, a pompous cousin unaccountably engaged to a clever woman, and a retired criminal barrister amongst the suspects, to say nothing of mysterious nocturnal young men and a powerful lover commonly regarded as above the law, Clare Curzon's knits a hypnotically gripping plot.
I suspect that it is a characteristic of Curzon's work to be unusually multi layered. Whereas the reprinted Flawed Light (reviewed recently for Mystery Women), had depths leading down into the daemonic, Last to Leave keeps the trademark complexly dark family psychology, yet angles it also towards something more socially various in the inclusion of series police characters. What is fascinating about Curzon's work is that she has a unique gift of portraying individuals as marked to the core by the deposit of family structures, even over generations. Indeed, it is key to her vision that single identities are a myth; we are bound up with family and work identities, sometimes to our peril. Here the stifling dysfunctional Dellar family collide with a much more healthily functioning 'family' in their dealings with the police, headed by intelligent, empathetic, Superintendent Mike Yeadings. Of course, Yeading's happy home life itself forms a base by which the reader is encouraged to contrast both the mysterious Dellars and the struggles of a bright woman junior officer against the sexism of her immediate superior.
What I particularly admired about Last to Leave is the brilliant structuring
of the plot through psychological resonance. We see old festering passions revealed
and do their work, while unexpected new alliances are forged in the suffering
caused by violent crime. The novel delicately balances the demands of art for
resolution, with the restrictions of realism in the limitations of the law.
Yeadings himself, with his uncanny intuitions, represents that union.
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Susan Rowland
Clare Curzon has published more than 40 novels.