‘What Came Before He Shot Her’
by Elizabeth George
Published by Hodder & Stoughton. January 2007.
ISBN 0-340-82749-1
I suppose that most readers of detective fiction are affectionately familiar with the characters created by Elizabeth George in her earlier novels, especially Thomas Lynley, his wife Helen ,and Barbara Havers. So it came as a considerable shock to read at the end of With No One As Witness that one of these characters was shot and killed by a twelve year old boy, with no apparent motive. This novel, as the title suggests, attempts to establish the events that led to this murder and to trace the life and motivation of Joel Campbell, the youth arrested and charged with the crime.
It is a long book, set in North Kensington which is the scene of much violence, the home of street gangs and a place where drugs and killings are a part of everyday life. Certainly, Elizabeth George has depicted a world able to convince a reader that a seriously disadvantaged but well-meaning youth could come inevitably to a point where he was forced to be charged with such a crime. As newspapers and television tell us regularly, violence and murder are a shocking part of life and death in major English cities, especially where street gangs war against each other. Perhaps not quite so common in England is such a crime committed against an adult in a residential area.
George explores the fate of a family of three children of mixed blood: a teenage girl, Ness, the twelve year old Joel, and disadvantaged seven year old, Toby. Their father has been gunned down in the street in front of them, their mother is in an institution and their grandmother goes off to America leaving them on the doorstep of their mother's unmarried sister, Kendra. She struggles to do her best for them but most of Joel's problems arise from trying to be the man of the family and particularly from trying to protect Toby from a street culture which sees his condition as an opportunity for bullying and getting at his older brother.
How it works out, in spite of well-meaning help from various adults, is inevitably depressing, as the reader knows, with the tragic foreknowledge that all the efforts to help these three will be prevented by the circumstances that end the previous book. Altogether, I prefer Elizabeth George's books when they are dealing with familiar characters solving crimes which have a chance of being resolved with some degree of success. I find the opening lines, "Joel Campbell, eleven years at the time, began his descent towards murder with a bus ride." a shade too depressing.
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Rosemary Brown