Silver Stain, Gold Standard

I’ve already mentioned on these pages how wonderful Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is, but I’m going to do it again, because they’re my pages, and because I can. Oh, and because I reviewed said novel as part of the most recent Irish Times crime fiction column, which appeared a couple of weeks back and was composed of short reviews of the latest novels from Sue Grafton, Parker Bilal, Kevin Brophy, Ann Cleeves and said Paul Johnston. To wit:

Crete is the setting for Paul Johnston’s 13th novel, THE SILVER STAIN (Crème de la Crime, £19.99), which sees a film producer commission Johnston’s Athens-based private eye, Alex Mavros, to find a movie star’s personal assistant. A straightforward assignment, but Mavros quickly discovers that the events being depicted on the film set – the Nazi invasion of Crete in 1941 – have contemporary resonances that prove lethal. A Scottish author living in Greece, writing about a detective who is half-Scottish, half-Greek, Johnston employs an observer who is ideally placed to make an outsider’s caustic observations about modern Crete, yet he knows the terrain well enough to give the setting a vividly authentic feel. The island’s time-honoured love-hate relationship with law and order, allied to pacy narrative and deadpan black humour courtesy of a knowingly archetypal private eye, all delivered in deceptively elegant prose, make THE SILVER STAIN an early contender for one of the best private detective novels of the year.

  For the rest of the column, clickety-click here …