Tina Shaw
Dark Sky by Marie Connolly (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024), 229pp, $37.99
Apart from outliers such as Dame Ngaio Marsh, who published her 32 whodunnits featuring police detective Roderick Alleyn in the middle years of the twentieth century, New Zealand crime fiction, up until fairly recently, was a mostly sober, dour and intermittent concern, notable for occasional classics such as David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) and Maurice Gee’s In My Father’s Den (1972). Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and now—thanks partly to the Ngaio Marsh Awards, established in 2010—Aotearoa New Zealand has a thriving crime-genre scene. It seems that celebrating a genre helps it grow as well. That growth is evident in the actual award entries: the 2010 offering had three finalists, while in 2023 there were seven finalists for Best Crime Fiction, and the 2024 Award announced a longlist of 12 novels. Notable New Zealand authors who have won Best Crime Novel include Fiona Kidman in 2019 with This Mortal Boy and Becky Manawatu with Auē in 2020. Even the late Renee was a convert to the genre with her 2019 crime novel The Wild Card.
Crime fiction in Aotearoa, like crime itself, is a growth area attracting a lot of media attention. Its production encompasses all sorts, from Paul Cleave’s splatter-spree serial killer novels to procedural-based works like those featuring Vanda Symon’s Detective Sam Shepard, thrillers exploring revised concepts of national identity such as Michael Bennett’s Better the Blood, and crime novels concerned with feminism and social inequality, such as Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz.
With Dark Sky, debut author Marie Connolly offers a police procedural in a picturesque locale. It is set in 2015 when the University of Canterbury Mt John Observatory at Tekapo celebrated its 50th birthday. In classic fashion, the prologue to the novel opens with the murder of Evelyn Major, recently appointed Director of the Mt John Observatory; she has been bludgeoned to death. Detection in this whodunnit is a team effort, with Detective Inspector Jack Simmons from Christchurch leading the investigation. The requirements are: untangle the facts, winnow the suspects, plumb the motives, test alibis, and eventually, identify the murderer.
Subtitled ‘A Nellie Prayle mystery’, this novel seems intended as the first of many. Nellie Prayle, as we learn from the cast of characters listed at the start of the book, is a clinical psychologist at Victoria University and, because of her interviewing skills, is helping with the police investigation into Evelyn’s murder. From the start, this seems a slightly odd setup, as police, I’d always assumed, are trained to interview suspects. At any rate, Nellie, nose quivering like a bloodhound, teams up with DI Jack Simmons to visit the observatory and meet various people, many of them distinguished international visitors, involved with the weekend’s planned celebrations.
Fairly quickly, we learn that Evelyn and her husband Oliver had been arguing the night of her murder, and there is useful backstory about how Oliver followed Evelyn to New Zealand and was at a loose end. As she progressed in her career, making a mark by leading an observatory, his prospects had become stagnant; although the difficulty in making two careers work in a relationship seems a rather dated issue. The academic world, however, is deftly portrayed, with its ambitions and competitive drive to succeed. It almost seems a hotbed of the Deadly Sins: pride, lust, envy, anger, greed. It’s a world that Christchurch-based author Connolly knows well, having worked in academia for 30 years.
The South Canterbury landscape, too, is something of a character, at once ominous and sublime: beautiful by day, but treacherous with freezing conditions and black ice by night. When Jack Simmons and Nellie Prayle first drive across the Mackenzie Basin towards the observatory, they witness two hawks frantically fighting then swooping away, before: ‘Mount John’s eastern flank stretched out before them, pine clad and dark against the grey sky. It was then they caught their first glimpse of turquoise water as they descended towards the lake.’
Ultimately, there are motives aplenty to fuel the narrative in Dark Sky. It is revealed, for example, that Evelyn had been having an affair with Professor Leo Winchester from Durham University. Wife Charlotte—depicted as an unpleasant person whom nobody likes—knows about the affair and confronts Evelyn. There are anomalies in the finances—another possible motive for the murder—involving Associate Professor and previous Director of Mt John Observatory Tony Lambert.
So, a gallery of suspects is sketched in, Agatha Christie-style. Through differing points of view, a few relationship dynamics are explored. We find out about the tensions in Leo and Charlotte’s marriage. Like Evelyn and Oliver, there is a chasm in the relationship between this couple as well. Charlotte had given up her own career to support Leo’s and doesn’t let him forget it.
University of Pennsylvania’s Mason Healy’s backstory tells us about the death of his brilliant friend, Eamon, and how Mason went on to publish their findings, including a clever algorithm that has since made him a sought-after astronomer. Nellie Prayle’s own history is not quite so detailed, though we do learn she occasionally likes to go fly-fishing. As Jack quips, ‘When she’s talking to our blokes, she always says that catching criminals is a lot like catching fish.’ And she dresses in black in a cool understated way; but she’s less about street-cred than cop-cred: her father was a police officer.
Described in the cover blurb as ‘not your typical murder—and nor are these your usual suspects’, Dark Sky’s main point of difference seems to lie in its live and wriggling suspects being from the academic world. As Detective Tim Fisher thinks to himself while studying their photographs on the police board, these are privileged people: ‘How different they were from the usual mug shots that normally stared back at him’. But the bland faces, as with any community, mask obsession, neurosis and grievance. Scandals at Canterbury University, it is noted, ‘were not uncommon. But murders, it had to be said, were unusual.’ The narrative inevitably refers to the ‘most famous scandal’ that rocked the university back in the 1950s, namely the Parker-Hulme murder.
Considering all the academics involved in this story, we might expect the killer to be smarter than your average crim … But perhaps having an education doesn’t make you smarter in real-world terms. Characters such as Leo and Charlotte certainly prove that point, as does academic ‘star’ Mason Healey, who, in a side thread, is found to have committed fraud through a dumb omission in the past. Not very bright, then. Hilariously, when he flees, it is to Blackball—a very unlikely kind of place for a distinguished Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Shady, shifty academics burning rubber to get away is bound to attract police interest.
In the meantime, there are more interviews and nuanced questions designed to trip up the unwary. There is much rehashing of details about what happened on the night Evelyn’s body was found at the base of the Boller and Chivens telescope. The investigation of her unlikely death is forensic and the interviews show a methodical approach on the part of the writer, as underscored by DI Simmons: ‘it’s shaping up as one of those hard-slog policing cases … Searching for clues, one step forward and two steps back.’ The list of persons of interest ‘with wobbly alibis’ soon numbers three, one of whom has actually been killed abruptly in a car crash. Pieces of the puzzle seem to be satisfyingly falling into place, but are they just there to foil the police and fool the reader?
And in the end, in keeping with the usual protocols of the cosy murder-mystery genre, the police are polite and plodding, with no internal strife and no concerns about budgets (they even, at one stage, get doughnuts)—but then, this is 2015, so perhaps a kinder time for police in Aotearoa. However, their language, in its colloquial earnestness, harks back to an even earlier time: ‘We’ll get the bastard who did this.’
Nellie’s own background also seems rather old-fashioned or anachronistic, with kind Uncle Bill at Fairlie her only family. Bill is on the spot to take care of PhD student Millie after she is frightened by an intruder in her hotel room. Might there be a little romance here too …? Sadly not. The main love interest in the story is fulfilled, mildly, by Nellie and Dave Thomas, ESR Forensic Scientist, as they get to know each other. Nothing steamy is going on here, unless it’s off-page. A hint of impending romance, though, is suggested in some coy interplay between Detective Phil Pio and Associate Professor Maia Gilbert.
There are other narrative hints that seem significant yet aren’t really developed. Wife Sarah warns Professor Peter Fitzgerald to be careful: ‘Nobody is above suspicion.’ Tony Lambert mentions a library peephole that might have been useful to build tension. Detective Tim talks to Canterbury University Human Resources, probing around, only to find that Tony Lambert was ‘casual’ with budgets. Similarly, there are areas in the novel that could have been developed more, for instance, the stunning terrain of the Mt John Observatory itself, with its domes that house the ‘dark sky’ telescopes.
Even though there are few surprises in Dark Sky—bodies don’t pile up—we do learn that educated people can commit acts of stupidity and make fatal mistakes. So not that different to the usual kind of crim, after all. Even in the academic world, as DI Simmons comments, ‘Crime never sleeps.’
TINA SHAW is the author of a number of novels, including The Black Madonna, written while she held the CNZ Berlin Writers’ Residency, The Children’s Pond, shortlisted for the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Awards, and, most recently, A House Built on Sand. She works as a manuscript assessor, mentor and tutor of creative writing. She lives in Taupō.
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