Outside the fantasy · 2017
Rhyming Rings
A young local reporter in 1980s London is stuck on human-interest stories while a killer stalks women, until his stories and the murders meet.
- Series
- Outside the fantasy · Crime novel, published after his death
- First published
- 2017, Gollancz
- Setting
- West London in the 1980s.
- Main characters
- Jeremy (Jem) Miller, Ethel, Mr Sutcliffe, DI Fletcher
The story
Jeremy Miller, Jem to his friends, is a young reporter on a weekly paper in West London in the 1980s, and he is not getting the stories he wants. A killer is attacking and murdering women on a local estate, leaving the police almost nothing to work with beyond the suggestion that he uses either hand with equal ease. Jem would give a great deal to be covering that case. Instead he is stuck with heart-warming local features about brave teenagers and neighbourhood characters, among them an elderly woman who says she has psychic gifts.
Ethel is that woman, and she turns out to matter. She claims to live through the last moments of the murdered women, and what she tells Jem ties her, and him, to the inquiry. The police, in the harassed person of DI Fletcher, take enough interest to ask for discretion. Ethel's next-door neighbour, Mr Sutcliffe, a big, elderly Matabele warrior who came to London from Rhodesia, sets himself up as her protector, and he is the most memorable figure in the book.
Newspaper stories have consequences, and before long the killer has reason to take an interest in Ethel and in the reporter who has been writing about her. The human-interest pieces and the murder case start to run together, with Jem as exposed as anyone. He tells the story himself, in the first person, and he is not always an easy narrator to like. The London around him is poor and racially tense, full of cigarette smoke and casual prejudice, and the newsroom scenes carry the weight of experience. Gemmell keeps the story moving briskly, and at around 270 pages it is much shorter than most of his fantasies.
Reading notes
Rhyming Rings is a curiosity, and best read as one. The manuscript was found among Gemmell's papers by his widow, Stella, and Gollancz published it in 2017, eleven years after his death, with an introduction by Conn Iggulden and an afterword by Stan Nicholls. Reviewers disagree about exactly when he wrote it. The story is set in the 1980s, and Jem's working life is plainly drawn from Gemmell's own years as a local newspaper journalist.
It is a crime thriller, and apart from Ethel's gift there is nothing supernatural in it. The first-person voice is unusual for Gemmell, and several reviewers felt it did not suit him: Jem is often hard to like, and his opinions tend to arrive as speeches. The crime plot is serviceable rather than surprising, and the killer's identity is not hard to guess.
What lifts it is the supporting cast, above all Mr Sutcliffe, who would not look out of place among Gemmell's old warriors, and its sense of a particular London at a particular moment, attitudes included. It is not the book he was working on when he died; that was the third Troy novel, Fall of Kings. Come to Rhyming Rings once you know his fantasy, for the pleasure of seeing the same instincts at work in another genre.