dinburgh in the 2020s is the "perfect city." Well, almost perfect. Tourists love it, but the impoverished locals toil under the yoke of a totalitarian regime modeled after Plato's Republic. Drugs and violent crime are almost unknown, but there is the occasional homicidal maniac.
Fortunately there's also Quintilian Dalrymple, the city's only private detective. Quint, introduced in Paul Johnston's first novel, Body Politic, literally wrote the book on investigative procedure for Edinburgh's guardians.
Quint not only has to track down an elusive killer who tortures and mutilates his victims, he's also up against inept and occasionally corrupt officials. A city guardian nicknamed "Machiavelli" keeps butting in on the case. Quint's investigation points to a mysterious place referred to in furtive whispers as "the Bone Yard," but Edinburgh's chief guardian refuses to tell him what or where the Bone Yard is and forbids him from pursuing the matter any further.
The killer, however, is a bit more helpful. For one, he kills the meddling Machiavelli. He also leaves cassette tapes in the bodies of his victims. The music on the tapes--blues numbers played by Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Paul Rodgers--provide subtle clues about a conspiracy involving a lethally powerful form of methamphetamine, an abandoned nuclear plant and, of course, the Bone Yard.
Quint also has help from his loyal sidekick, Davie, and Katharine, a former lover who has ventured across the gang-ravaged countryside to return to Edinburgh with important information for Quint.
A grim but implausible vision
The Bone Yard moves at a fast clip, and Johnston evokes a bleak yet somehow affectionate portrait of Edinburgh in midwinter. It's a city desperately in need of a hero, and Quintilian Dalrymple makes an appealing protagonist, a hard-shelled but not hard-boiled detective with more emotional range than many of the detectives that are cast in the mold of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.
Unfortunately, The Bone Yard suffers from serious plausibility deficits. Johnston posits a 21st-century city-state so repressive that it makes Stalin's Russia look like a freewheeling anarchy. Edinburgh has a low crime rate and a docile, dispirited populace even though the Platonist rulers make scant use of basic tools of repression such as surveillance, terror and propaganda. You would think that more than a few citizens would realize that life doesn't have to be quite this crappy.
Detectives have plied their trade in less credible milieus, from Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to the starkly surreal 21st century of K.W. Jeter's Noir. These places, however, had a certain amount of internal consistency and were intriguing enough to allow the willing suspension of disbelief. By contrast, Johnston seems to have thrown together a hodgepodge of dystopian tropes that date back to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.
Johnson develops the plot and characters with a bit more care, though some characters might still be alive if Quint weren't so bafflingly slow to put two and two together. The conspiracy he unravels doesn't amount to anything interesting, and Quint's showdown with the killer is even more anticlimactic.
