Customer Reviews

The Grave Tattoo

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Val McDermid is an excellent writer, one of my favorites in the gritty mystery genre, so I did not hesitate to pick up The Grave Tattoo. This new offering is also a kind of detective story, with some truly nasty goings-on but involves more painstaking scholastic research than typical sleuthing. It reminds me of the line in "DaVinci Code" where Robert's reaction to being chased is "I need a library", one of my favorite quotes. In Tattoo, McDermid deftly combines history, forensics, suspense, literature, and danger into another compelling, atmospheric murder mystery. Both male and female characters are skillfully drawn in 3 dimensions, and the plot with its tantalizing backstory inexorably draws the reader in and won't let go. Definitely not a cosy or a romance, Tattoo should appeal to readers who enjoy a bit of intellectual exercise embedded within their entertainment.

A bizarrely tattooed body is discovered in the UK Lake District. There are persistent rumours that Fletcher Christian secretly returned from his exile to Pitcairn Island and was harboured by William Wordsworth, a childhood friend, who turned his tale into an epic poem. Because the manuscript has remained hidden, there is no conclusive proof of its existence. Can the body be that of Fletcher Christian? Is the manuscript still extant? Who holds the key to the past? Wordsworth Scholar Jane Gresham would love to find the manuscript, as would many others and not all are as scrupulous.

Peopled with interesting characters, the research through the past in combination with some fast action in the present provides the potential ingredients for a good mystery. This book involves a number of different subplots, some of which are more satisfying than others. Overall, the total package worked well for me, and I enjoyed the read.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

This is one of Val McDermid's best books. A great mix between history (Mutiny on the Bounty),poetry (William Wordsworth), mystery (multiple murders) and action.

Jane Gresham, a specialist in the works of William Wordworth, is intriguid when a 200-year old body is found. She is sure that this is the body of Fletcher Christian, the person who started the mutiny on the Bounty. Furthermore, she is convinced that the only reason why Fletcher returned to England was to meet William Wordsworth, a friend of his family, and to tell him the real story about the mutiny on the Bounty.
The search for the lost manuscript, which is worth a fortune, can begin.

Because this is not just a detective story, a lot of people who have never heard of Val McDermid, will probably also want to read this book. It has everything to become a bestseller. A must-read.

Why does the Bounty story fascinate us so? (Please don't say it's the sight of Mel Gibson in tight trousers and a pigtail.) From three movie versions to the celebrated Nordhoff and Hall trilogy, from contemporary 18th-century accounts to recent historiography, the tale of mutiny, survival and exile has been told and retold. In part I think it's the age-old drama of rebellion against tyranny: heroic Fletcher Christian confronting evil Captain Bligh, setting his former commander afloat in an open boat to make his way back to England, then leading the crew to a refuge on the obscure shores of Pitcairn Island. Modern interpretations, however, have corrected the romantic might versus right version with an awareness of class difference and historical context --- portraying Bligh not as a sadist but as a brilliant navigator whose leadership style was no more authoritarian than any other captain in Her Majesty's Navy at the time.

In THE GRAVE TATTOO we get yet another angle, albeit purely speculative, on the Bounty. Val McDermid, best known for her gritty, urban psychological thrillers, heads this time into historical/literary-mystery territory, playing with the hypothesis that Christian, who is understood to have been murdered a few years after reaching Pitcairn, didn't die. Instead, he escaped back to England, where he contacted the poet William Wordsworth (with whom he had gone to school) and told him the true story of the mutiny and its aftermath --- which became the basis for a lost epic poem.

McDermid's protagonist is young, pretty Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham. When a reasonably intact body with tattoos from the South Sea Islands is found in a bog in the Lake Country, Jane realizes that it could be Fletcher Christian. Soon she is hot on the trail of the missing manuscript, tracing it to descendants of Wordsworth's housemaid, who attended his deathbed. When elderly members of that family start dying too frequently and conveniently, THE GRAVE TATTOO takes on some of the attributes of a more standard whodunit.

McDermid's technique is to alternate the modern tale with excerpts from the story Fletcher Christian told Wordsworth (she doesn't attempt a reconstruction of the lost poem) --- a double-barreled narrative device I've encountered quite a lot lately and of which I'm becoming a bit weary. She mixes in plenty of subplots and subsidiary characters, too: a broken romance for Jane; sibling rivalry between Jane and her petulant teacher brother; the trials of Jane's protégé, Tenille, a 13-year-old mixed-race girl with a taste for Romantic poetry (the freshest voice in the book); the investigations of a forensic anthropologist named River Wilde (!) and her policeman boyfriend. There is also a good deal of rhapsodizing about the beauties of the Lake Country, where Jane spent her childhood, but the language often sounds like that of a travel brochure.

Unfortunately, that isn't the only sense in which this novel is predictable. McDermid has a couple of interesting (psychosexual) twists on what "really" happened, but I don't think THE GRAVE TATTOO succeeds either as a mystery (I guessed the villain way before the end) or a literary-historical puzzle. Background data about Wordsworth and the Bounty is introduced mechanically, via various handy stock characters, and clues turn up all too fortuitously; it's like a sketch for a novel rather than the real thing.

This is very odd, since I have found all of McDermid's work up until now absolutely riveting (notably her Carol Jordan/Tony Hill series, one of which I reviewed for this website a couple of years ago), with fiendishly clever plots and credible, complex characters. I'm all for authors reinventing themselves --- it's a shame to get stuck in a formula, no matter how successful --- but for me this experiment just didn't work.

I read THE GRAVE TATTOO while staying, appropriately, on an island, the sound of the sea crashing in the background and the smell of salt in the air. Probably we will never know which version of the mutiny --- because, Rashomon-like, there are several --- is true. When men and masters are trapped on a sailing ship, miles from anywhere, with tensions building and rage exploding, anything can happen and, evidently, did. It's still a whale of a story.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

I've read many of McDermid's books. I must admit I bought this one simply because it involves the infamous mutiny on the Bounty, and Wordsworth. I have long been intrigued by both, though Wordsworth perhaps isn't as popular as he once was. And if any writer could somehow combine these two elements, it is Val McDermid.

Let's see: there's a post doctoral Wordsworth scholar, a smart thirteen-year-old, a centuries-old body in a bog in the Lake District which may or may not be Fletcher Christian, a lost manuscript that may or may not exist, a few murders sprinkled in throughout, and everyone in the story seems motivated by self interest. When reading this novel, trust no one's motives.
Jane works two jobs while trying to turn her doctoral thesis into a book; she lives in council housing, amongst the poor, the criminals and the criminally negligent of the East End, and is lonesome and nostalgic about her home in the Lake District. She is befriended by a rough young girl named Tenille, who hates school but loves poetry. McDermid has created a wonderful character in this tough, wise, scared and scary girl.
McDermid in fact has done a great thing with all the characters in this tale, and with the plot, twisted, tangled, slow to get started and sometimes racing along, and with scene and mood. No one writes about urban grit and grime like McDermid, but she does an equally expert job of the countryside to which all major characters retire to then become involved in a race to discover: is there a lost epic poem based on Christian's adventures? Did he in fact manage to return to England and live, and if so, was he then dispatched in a peat bog, and if so, why? Who can Jane really trust, Jake, the ex lover, Dan the stalwart friend, her brother Matthew, beset by jealousy, Tenille, who turns up on the run from the cops in London (as a body has turned up there,)and who proceeds to "help" Jane search for the missing poem? Can she really trust the curator at the Wordsworth Trust?
Dead bodies are produced at an alarming rate. Jane is followed, watched, stalked, a near victim of a hit-and-run, then she's hit on the head, and she has to help Tenille stay one step ahead of the police, and she has to figure out who would want the missing manuscript enough to kill for it. I never knew scholars had this much excitement.
Excitement is what you'll find, from the lanquid and stifling beginning in London, to the thrill of getting closer to her objective, Jane goes from being blissfully concentrated on her search to being crafty with the cops.

"All landscapes hold their own secrets. Layer on layer, the past is buried beneath the surface. Seldom irretrievable, it lurks, waiting for human agency or meteorological accident to force the skeleton up through flesh and skin back into the present. Like the poor, the past is always with us."

I was hooked. In the midst of these several mysteries and betrayals, you'll find human failings and inconsistencies, and some excellent writing.

I have read Val McDermid before - Tattoo had a great premise - a search for a lost Wordsworth epic work about Fletcher Christian from Bounty fame. Christian, who was smuggled back to England, was friends with Wordsworth. Christian wanted to tell someone the real story - that couldn't be published in his lifetime without reprisals for both men - In present day, enter a Wordsworth scholar, a young black girl from the projects, and a trek to Jane's (the scholar) family home to find the mysterious manuscript and see if a man's body found well preserved in a bog that has south seas tattoos could be Christian - If only the characters and actions in this book matched the great premise and promise. Yes, there is action, but the writing is so flatline, it does not get you involved.
The inside cover of Tattoo promises this is on par with Dante Club, and Historian - that is a definite NO WAY.
I am sorry the book didn't connect - there is information on Wordsworth and Christian, and I am a fan of William Wordsworth, but it is not enough. There is no character development, no one to cheer for. The only beauty came from the bits and pieces of Wordworth's manuscript, but that's only a blurb before every chapter. The last pages were interesting, but it was too late.

"The Grave Tattoo," Val McDermid's latest, is a standalone mystery set in England's renowned, pastorally beautiful, genteel Lake District. McDermid, an award-winning, relatively new author, is best-known for her engrossing Dr. Tony Hill/ DCI Carol Jordan mystery series. At any rate, this book's plot involves two of the District's supposed native sons, each still famed in his own way: leading 19th Century Romantic Poet William Wordsworth; and Fletcher Christian, instigator of the contemporary infamous mutiny on the Bounty. According to the book, they were not only both local, but were also friends from earliest schooldays. Unfortunately, as I dropped the English major at school because it required the Romantic Poets; and gentility has never worked for me, I can't personally vouch for the truth of any of this.

McDermid is surely best known as one of the leading lights of the tartan noir school of British mystery writing. What's that? A mystery that's daker, more bloody and violent than the usual, luckily, lightened with the occasional flash of that dark Scottish humor. Written by a Scot, of course: and McDermid is. Anyway, here we don't find much scent of tartan noir, but McDermid has come up with an audacious idea to hang her plot on. Notably, that Christian found his way home from the Pacific Pitcairn Island where he'd settled, met his old friend Wordsworth, and debriefed him on the truth of the mutiny: Captain Bligh was then ascendant in England. Furthermore, that Wordsworth then wrote a long epic poem about the mutiny, but held it back from publication, as Christian was an unpopular, famous felon. And the law prescribed jail time for aiding and abetting. Supposedly, however, this meeting and the poem it produced live in local legend. But, once again, don't look to me to know anything about this.

The book opens after a rainy summer has brought a body to light in one of the district's bogs. At first glance, numerous characteristics, including the presence of black tattoos considered native to the 18th century South Seas area, suggest it might be Fletcher Christian. Jane Gresham, born-in-the-Lake District Wordsworth scholar, has long thought local gossip about the poet and the poem might be true, so the finding of this body causes her to go home to research the possibilities. In this effort, she is aided and hindered by her brother Matthew, forensic pathologist Dr. River Wilde (sic), Tenille Cole, a fugitive black teenaged friend (don't ask); her ex- Jake Hartnell, his current squeeze Caroline Kerr, both rare book dealers, and gay friend Dan Seaborne. But, for better or worse, when you consider and honor McDermid's core idea, I could have lived without a couple of the hackneyed subplots. To me, they just slow things up. But what do I know?

I have read almost all of Val McDermids books so I was very excited to see this new one in the bookstore. However the story never really takes off, the characterization is weak and does not develop and the story is pretty uninteresting.
The climax is reasonably well done but if one doesn't care about the characters who really cares?

Val McDermid has proven herself an outstanding mystery writer in the past with efforts like "Place of Execution" and "Wire in the Blood," so it was dismaying to read this novel and see plot and characterization spinning out of control as if this were a first novel. Too many characters, too many subplots and too much history leave the reader with no more than an outline for two or three novels. A wise editor would have taken a pruning shears to this work while it was still a first draft. She attempts to cram in so much that there is no space for proper characterization and some plot turns seem to sacrifice reason to keep the story moving.

This is a fine book. It is richly imagined and nicely executed. The story, while anchored in fact, is fresh and the setting is beautifully realized. I prefer it to A Place of Execution and that was a lovely book. Those who are familiar with the Lake District will confirm the quality and precision of McDermid's representations of it--down to such details as the cloying nature of Dove Cottage and Wordsworth's need to go outside it in order to work.

Multiple, but related plots converge from multiple points and the conclusion is tidy and economical. The only problem for me was one of genre. There are strong elements of noir (the slummy London project in which the protagonist, her black 13 year-old friend and her gangsta father live), of international crime (with an antiquity-seeking, man-devouring string puller in the Mediterranean), and of the cozy (the Lakeland setting, with its local police and local `characters'). There are also some nice dollops of the procedural with a sexy forensic anthropologist and a body found in a peat bog that might just be that of Fletcher Christian. So we have the historical mystery as well as the literary mystery, with Christian's connections with Wordsworth.

This is not to suggest that the novel is a hash, for the tone remains more or less consistent throughout and the plot holds the attention firmly. I would say that a medley of genres seldom works in this kind of fiction and that while this is an excellent book, one that has much in it to be admired, the mingling of genre elements holds the book back, and that is a pity. It is still highly recommended.