Book Review: “Piece of My Heart,” by Peter Robinson

Piece of My Heart: A Novel of Suspense, by Peter Robinson (paperback)

Have you ever bought a book as a present for a friend, then become so fascinated by it that you decided to buy a copy for yourself? That happened with me in this instance—though, as sometimes occurs, I put it aside until I had the time and motivation to read it. Both arrived around the new year. 

 At the time, I had nothing else pressing to write, and, while contemplating what to read next, I noticed an obituary in The New York Times for Arabella Spencer-Churchill, granddaughter of the British Prime Minister, who carved out her own niche by establishing the Glastonbury rock festival in the 1970s. That reminded me of the Robinson book and its treatment of the rock music scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies, as did Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll. I picked up Robinson’s mystery with renewed interest at that point, and did not want to put it down again until I finished. 

I was surprised to discover, from Robinson’s Web site, that he hails from Canada rather than the England that forms the heart of so many of his novels. So atmospheric and textured are his tales that, I assumed, they could only have been written by someone intimate with these places—a lifelong native, actually. 

Though plot is inevitably at the heart of a mystery’s appeal, many readers of the Banks series such as myself are also quite taken with his musical tastes. Several delighted reviewers have even gone so far as to suggest that you can create a very fine iPod program through the songs he mentions during the book. 

Like Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (which, come to think of it, has one of the first fictional detectives, Inspector Bucket), this “braided narrative” intertwines two plot lines, seemingly unconnected at first, but which, we gradually learn, bear on each other. One involves a beautiful young woman found dead at a British music festival in 1969; the other, a freelance male journalist found dead 36 years later, bludgeoned to death, in the same Yorkshire region as the earlier crime. 

The detective in each case—Stanley Chadwick, a Scottish WWII vet horrified by the excesses of ‘60s youth (including his own teenage daughter), and Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Alan Banks nearly two generations later—puts together the clues, revealing his own failings as well as the facts in the investigation. 

Pulling off these constant shifts in time and plot is devilishly hard, but Robinson has created an artistically brilliant structure of such suspense that it leaves an increasing knot in the reader’s stomach. The first of his police procedurals that I’ve read, it also left me eager to read more. 

The protagonist in more than a dozen of Robinson’s novels, DCI Banks possesses his full complement of personal difficulties. (This particular installment in the series hints at prior problems involving his brother, as well as an intimate relationship with subordinate Annie Cabbot that has subsided to a bantering friendship.) 

Maybe it’s because Robinson has devoted so much attention before to Banks, or maybe because I am so interested in the 1960s background of the first murder (my childhood occurred during that decade, and like many other people those are among my most vivid memories). 

But DCI Chadwick comes across as a more compelling character than Banks—prickly and out of step with the psychedelic milieu he must investigate. The younger generation disgusts him with their pacifism and drug abuse. At best, they leave him cold; at worst, they raise his ire to the point where he can barely control it, and is even prepared to exceed the limits of his stern moral code to build a case against one of them. 

(Chadwick is very close to my age now, and while I don’t share his conservatism and rock-ribbed Presbyterianism, I’m inclined to agree with him more than I might have done at the time that ‘60s youth could be awfully self-congratulatory and smug about how they were going to change the world.) 

Part of the fun in the novel lies in its roman a clef (i.e., “novel with a key”) element—you’re continually reminded of real-life counterparts to fictional situations. The group at the heart of the Sixties mystery is the Mad Hatters, a name not only unmistakably reminiscent of one of the major literary influences of the age, Alice in Wonderland (see Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”), but also suggestive of the insanity that swept through the entertainment industry of the time and the larger world that embraced its radical experimentations in musical form and expanded consciousness. 

Other real-life elements echoed here are a mysterious death in a swimming pool (a la the still-unexplained demise of Rolling Stone Brian Jones) and the madness of one of the Hatters, a musician who will bring to mind for many readers such people as Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. (The latter is also memorably evoked in Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll). 

What makes this novel so suspenseful is Chadwick’s personal stake in the outcome. From the first, we sense that his daughter Yvonne is too close to the crime scene for his comfort—in age and looks, she almost resembles the victim—and as the plot continues, her ties to the events only strengthen. 

Like so much else in the novel, even its title has a double element. Fans of ‘60s music will recall the Janis Joplin hit of this name. However, the title also refers to a grisly piece of forensic evidence at the heart of this unusually thoughtful, compelling mystery.