#Review - The Red Hollow by Natalie Marlow

The Red Hollow

Natalie Marlow
Baskerville, 28 March 2024 
Available as: HB, 307pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399801843

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Red Hollow  to consider for review.

William (Billy) Garrett and Phyll (Hall) are back, six months after the events of Needless Alley, for another investigation in the 1930s Midlands. In this story, though, Marlow moves away from the noir-ish atmosphere of the earlier books, with its dark, smoky cityscape and its themes of political and economic corruption, and gives us something more like a classic 30s murder mystery in which a group of people are stranded in a remote country house. The sense of place is equally strong. But so is the sense of cloying evil - reminding me of Sherlock Holmes's comment that the vilest crimes take place in the countryside.

The story opens with a call for help. Phyll's brother, Freddy, is being cared for in a private asylum in the village of Red Hollow "out in the county" (though within a short driving distance). The fees for this have swallowed up the family money, explaining why she's been so desperate for cash and now its proprietor, Dr Moon, asks her and William to investigate strange disturbances and a death that have taken place. The unspoken deal is this will cover some of the fees.

So Phyll and William venture out into the woods, and soon find themselves out of their depth, The surviving patients - including Freddy - put the strange events down to the legendary man-hating "mermaid" which is said to haunt the local lake. This creature recurs, in folkloric allusions, a carving in the local church, and as part of the family backstory of Lady Pike, who owns the Hall but has been forced to let it out. her family has, it seems, many eminently hateable men in its lineage.

A phantom mermaid can't, however, have been killing and mutilating patients, even if the weather has taken a preternatural turn for the torrential, stranding Phyll overnight. Fretting alone in Birmingham, he calls on his old gangster friend Queenie for help. Then the fun really begins...

This is an exceptionally creepy, tense novel, mainly focussed on the events of a single night during which William, Phyll, Queen and Moon, joined by a ragtag collection of patients and the fearsome dowager Lady Pike, sustain themselves variously by copious amounts of drugs, drink and tobacco. There are gruesome deaths (the local vicar is bludgeoned in the first few moments). There are disturbing visions. And there is a tangled plot bringing together the unspoken secret of Red Hollow Hall, modern gang violence and of course the shadow of the War. 

As to the latter, this book is soaked in the backwash of the Trenches - most of the male characters played some part and it shapes their hopes and fears, their responses to, especially, the kind of stress they find themselves under here. This is very much an asylum where the patients are in charge - indeed Moon himself struck me as a man who could easily be on either side of the padded door, as it were. So, be assured, the switch to something that at first sight looks like a cosy Golden Age mystery doesn't mean that Marlow is going soft on us, indeed the opposite is true. Nor, in the end, are we free of political or at least social commentary with two very different historical trends - the stifling hand of the aristocracy, and the dark stirrings of organised crime - surfacing. (Or perhaps, not so very different trends, isn't aristocracy just gangsterism which has forgotten its roots?)

Plot strands wrap together - the delusions of the patients, that relentless fear of something evil in the dark, the decline of the Pike family in the face of coal mines and clay pits eating up their land and dissolute fathers and sons eating up the estate, Queenie's uneasy sway over the Birmingham underworld, and more.

It makes for a messy, compromising, affair, one that nobody comes away from with clean hands, but which is a fascinating, nail biting read and one I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Red Hollow, see the publisher's website here.