A pig, a spy and a feminist

In Joseph Caldwell’s The Pig Did It (Delphinium, $22.95, 195 pages), it almost doesn’t matter who did it, because this is such an enchanting story told in graceful prose lilting with irreverent Irish humor. What makes it even more delightful is that this is the first in Mr. Caldwell’s forthcoming “Pig Trilogy.”

It is a novel full of the deliciously unexpected, an account of a young American, Aaron McCloud, who is distracted from his romantic problems by what may be one of the great pigs of literature.

This pig is a formidable animal which thinks nothing of digging up a corpse in the garden of McCloud’s aunt, Kitty McCloud, who almost steals the book from the pig. She is a best-selling novelist who has made her fortune by writing books in which she blithely corrects what she sees as the failings of the classics and endows them with happy endings.

She tinkers with such books as Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” in which Kitty has Mr. Rochester throwing himself from the burning house, and his mad wife surviving to become best friends with the pious heroine.

Such an aunt is unlikely to have a predictable reaction to a dead body in her garden, and she doesn’t. She accuses her neighbor, Lolly McKeever, of killing “Declan Tovey, the last of the good stout men” because he had spurned her (Lolly’s) romantic advances. Who actually killed Tovey is revealed in a hilarious finale warning of the danger of laughing at ludicrous best-sellers, or the even more severe consequences of kicking a pig.

Especially this pig.

You can hardly wait for part two of the “Pig Trilogy.”

•••

Perhaps only Ian Rankin would visualize spies in forms of beetles. And probably only Ian Rankin would write a spy novel full of reflections on the habits of beetles in comparison with those involved in intelligence work.

It is interesting that “Watchman” (published now in the United States for the first time) is one of the earlier works of an author noted for his portrayal of “tartan noir” crime featuring the grim and gritty detective John Rebus whose territory is the grim and gritty streets of Edinburgh.

The book is fraught with the bleakness of mood that afflicts those who feel that what they are doing they have done too long, and that what they dread most is catching up with them. It is vintage Rankin, concise and succinct in its delineation of a world of shadows and betrayal.

He begins the book with what may be a classic description of an intelligence agent — “Miles Flint wore glasses: they were his only distinguishing feature.”

This a spy who “thought of the death watch beetle, ticking like a time bomb, and of the whirligig beetle, skating across the surfaces of ponds.” This is a spy who has “never received a more handsome gift in his life” than his son’s present of a year’s adoption of a dung beetle at the London zoo. On a sardonic note, the author observes, “What his (Flint’s) colleagues did not know was that he had found counterparts for them all in the beetle world.”

Yet Flint’s beetle fixation has its risk for his intelligence work because “he no longer killed beetles and had no desire to exhibit anyone else’s killings. He was content to read about beetles”for he had learned the value of life.”

Flint is also making mistakes in his work and when his personal negligence contributes to the death of a foreign agent in London, he reacts dangerously by launching his own private investigation into those around him, including his unfaithful wife. He becomes haunted by concern about how much people know about him.

Story Continues →