Gallows View: An Inspector Banks Mystery

Hugh Oliver is editor-in-chief at the OISE Press.

Gallows View is the first novel of Peter Robinson, who grew up in Yorkshire, England, and who emigrated to Canada in 1974. The subtitle is “An Inspector Banks Mystery,” and I gather that a second Banks Mystery has already been completed.

As one brought up on Agatha Christie, a “mystery” conjures up for me a country home or an island or an aircraft in which half-a-dozen people are isolated, and one (or more) of whom is murdered; it then becomes the business of the reader to anticipate (from clues dropped by the author or previous knowledge of the author’s manipulative tactics) who the murderer is prior to the ultimate revelation by the detective in the last chapter. In short, the book is a battle of wits between author and reader, and the reader wins if he / she guesses right who dun it.

All of this preamble is simply to say that Gallows View is not quite that kind of mystery. Set in a small Yorkshire town, there is a Peeping Tom (whose identity comes to light at the end), a pair of teenage burglars (whom we know because part of the action is pursued from their perspective), and an incidental murder which seems to have been included simply because mystery books are supposed to have murders.

The chief focus of the story is, naturally enough, Inspector Banks, a congenial working class-cum-yuppie policeman who has a charming wife and the moral fortitude that just enables him to resist the attentions of a lady psychologist brought in to create a profile of the Peeping Tom. In essence, then, Gallows View (the name of the street on which the murder victim lived) is a novel about a police inspector trying to solve a series of crimes, and, of necessity, the characterization is rather more sophisticated than that of the typical whodunit.

Certainly Peter Robinson displays potential. But assuming that he is going to go on writing in Canada, it seems a pity that he hasn’t chosen a Canadian setting for his series. And although this first book of his is quite entertaining, it is not quite well enough written to be a regular novel and not quite enough of a whodunit to be a regular mystery.