Review - The Skeleton Man

There are all sorts of reasons to read. To escape, or learn, or entertain yourself (or entertain others by stealing material; personally I’d rank literature up there with alcohol or having your own army as a seduction tool). Literature, in particular, can be read to provoke an emotional response, ‘thrillers’ are called that for a reason.

One of the ways in which books can thrill is where the story takes place somewhere you know. It’s like seeing your home town on television, although you hope as the setting for some quality costume drama, rather than on the news with the caption ‘toxic horror spill’ slapped over the pictures. Reading about somewhere you know is great as you can feel smug when you realise that you are one of a select group who will recognise the liberties that the author has taken with the local geography.

‘The skeleton man’, like the other Philip Dryden mysteries, is set in the Fens of East Anglia, a vast, man-made and very flat landscape of endless fields of soil black as sin, criss-crossed by roads down which fenny drivers speed, and the drains, rivers and waterways that were created to reclaim the land from the sea. Specifically, the novel is set in and around Ely, a ‘city’ because it has a cathedral, but in reality not so much a one-horse town but a town that has a horse-sharing arrangement with some place in the Cotswolds.

I know Ely and the surrounding area fairly well and Jim Kelly, a resident, does a fantastic job of nailing not just how this part of the world looks, but how it feels to inhabit it. Uneasy.

Philip Dryden is a newspaper reporter, once a high-flier in Fleet Street, now relocated to Ely and working on a provincial newspaper, permitting a lifestyle that allows him to care for his wife, slowly recovering from a terrible accident, drink far too much, eat poorly and indulge in his favourite pastime – annoying authority figures. In ‘The Skeleton Man’ he is able to do all of this as well as solve a twenty year old murder.

This is a book about confinement, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional. The tombs in the book, both formal and informal, are uneasy resting places. Other confined spaces may be disreputable, but are far from sinister; Humph, Dryden’s enigmatic informal chauffer, confines himself to the driver’s seat of his beloved, rusted Ford Capri with a dedication that is to be feared and admired, much like his diet.

These enclosed spaces provide stark contrast to the hugeness of the Fen landscape. Jim Kelly does well to convey the astounding sense of isolation that one can feel standing under the vast East Anglian sky, but that isolation exists too in the tiny community of Jude’s Ferry, the village at the centre of the mystery driving the book. It becomes clear that a figure can be as isolated in a village, or a family.

Past events returning to haunt people is theme of the Dryden mysteries, but are particularly effective here, where the discovery of a nameless skeleton hanging in a secret room in a deserted village starts Dryden off on the trail of his mystery. The other theme of the Dryden mysteries is the weather, Jim Kelly has realised that in the Fens, the sky is as much part of the landscape as the land. Here, the importance of weather is acknowledged by starting the story on St Swithun’s Day.

Readers, I suspect, have a habit of thinking that the book they have enjoyed would make a great television programme. God alone knows why, as adaptations normally leave the reader feeling cheated. Having said that, I’d like to see an illustrated edition of this book, as the Fens photograph like an Edward Hopper painting, with that flat light nailing the features of the landscape just as Jim Kelly’s prose nails the sense of place. Oh, and I’d love some pictures of the backwaters and pubs, office spaces and rooms full of dust and history, garages and laybys of the fens, and even a few shots of a rusting Capri. In short, I’d buy this book again in another edition – it’s that good.