The Scribbler by Iain Maitland

‘It was these glorious thirty to forty seconds of delicious anticipation.

Before he plunged the screwdriver into his unsuspecting victim.

That the man with the latex gloves liked the most.’

Iain Maitland has already proved himself the master of the psychological thriller. His Mr Todd’s Reckoning (2019) was gripping, terrifying and very, very clever; I can still feel the heat of that interminable, suffocating, summer in Ipswich, the growing claustrophobia in the shabby bungalow on the London road. Normally I would never read anything scary; I like my crime light and cosy; old ladies, knitting, tea shops…you know the kind of thing. But I couldn’t stay away from Mr Todd; it was one of my books of the year.

And now Maitland is back, with a different story, and one that is every bit as good.

The Scribbler starts as a bit of a police procedural. DI Roger Gayther is back at work;

‘”A washed up old has-been shuffling through dead files” as he’d probably put it.’

He’s been off, dealing with personal issues after the death of his alcoholic wife, and now he’s been sidelined into a portacabin, looking at cold case files, crimes unsolved for many years, most of them probably unsolvable, all of them sharing a common feature; the victims were LGBTQ+. And as Gayther acknowledges,

“It’s an outrage. The way it was all downgraded because it was ‘only’ gay men being killed. The world’s moved on since then, thank God, and the police have too. But there’s still that sense of LGBTQ+ people somehow not being quite as important.”’

Working with Gayther is newish recruit Georgia Carrie. Carrie may know her way around a mobile phone and a satnav a lot better than her boss, but she has respect for Gayther’s traditional detective skills, and unlike many police partnerships, Gayther and Carrie’s is refreshingly untroubled. They look out for one another, accept each other’s little foibles; she winds him up about his appalling diet, he laughs at her when she (an English graduate) quotes Congreve.

So far, so interesting. Maitland’s writing is always excellent, every word is crafted. In many crime novels plot is all that matters; here is an author who never skimps on character development or setting. We soon feel we know Gayther and Carrie; we like them. But Maitland isn’t one for hanging around. Gayther has hit on a case he wants to follow up; the murder of a number of gay men in the 1980s and 90s. The perpetrator, who was never identified, picked up his victims in bars or public toilets, persuaded them to take him to remote spots in their own cars, then stabbed them to death. And afterwards he left a very special calling card; a cartoon likeness of each man, etched on the stomach with a knife, then scored out with cross hatching. The press named him 'The Scribbler.'

‘”And so" (Carrie) said, “why are we looking at this case again now? First of all?”

“Because he’s back Carrie. The Scribbler is back.”’

A retired vicar has died at a local care home. A coroner has certified a case of death by misadventure; a demented old man who threw himself out of a window when no-one was looking. But Edwin Lodge was one of the few men who had once survived an attack by The Scribbler, and before he died he had told staff that he had seen his attacker again, and that the Scribbler would be ‘coming back to get him.’  And someone had etched a face on Edwin’s stomach and scratched it out.

So Gayther and Carrie begin their investigation with a drive through the Suffolk countryside to Dunwich, and  a visit to the King’s Court Care Home. One of Maitland’s many strengths is his attention to detail; his description of the home brings it alive, and every person Gayther and Carrie meet there is memorable, from harassed manager Ruth Coombes to super-smooth Dr Khan and poor confused Miss Baker. Maitland does not deal in cardboard characters or cliches, every scene rings true, and as a result we are totally engaged at all times.

The original investigation found three likely suspects. Gayther and Carrie follow them up; the aging drag queen, the plumber turned builder, the travelling salesman. Maitland draws us in, to the seedy bungalow with its ‘great long garden…room for a cemetery of bodies’, the builders’ yard, the decaying cottage with its ‘smell of damp and decay and something else’, its ‘half-inside, half-outside, lean-to toilet….unflushed.’ There are no long passages of description here; a few words are enough when they are this well-chosen. We get the picture, so well. And we know any of these men could be a killer.

Meanwhile, The Scribbler is active again, and the development of the police investigation is interspersed with his narrative. Maitland carefully distances the reader from the murderer; until the last scenes of the book he is referred to only as ‘the man with the latex gloves’ – hence we have no way of knowing if he is one of the suspects or not. As we follow him on his visits to empty parks and sordid lavatories, we gradually pick up little hints about his background and motives; we start to see inside his head, and the twisted mind it houses. 

We eventually see the man in his home surroundings, and learn a bit more about his life, and what has brought him to this point. It is again one of Maitland’s strengths that he can let us understand a killer without diverting us from the horror of his crimes. We can see why he has ended up as he has, but we will never be wholly on his side – and if anyone has any doubts, a shocking event towards the end of the book sorts those out and brings us face to face with evil.

Speech patterns are another strength in this book. At first I queried the killer’s slightly formal language; where most people would say ‘I don’t’, he says ‘I do not.’ A small point, perhaps, but I soon realised that it's an important one; it tells us much about the man’s home life.

Very few authors could sustain the tension of a final scene over one hundred and eighteen pages. Maitland, however, has the reader bound up as tightly as a hostage, and he never loses that grip. I felt as if I had held my breath for every one of those tension-filled pages; by the end I was exhausted, but also satisfied; there are no loose ends, just many thoughts; thoughts about the damage parents can do to children, and about the damage that must surely have been done to them; about the passage of time, and the cruelty of prejudice and homophobia.

This is an outstandingly good book.

And even in the Epilogue, Maitland teases us with a scene that could be one thing or something quite different. He just can’t stop himself; good thing he’s a writer rather than a psychopathic murderer.  

The Scribbler by Iain Maitland is published by Contraband, an imprint of Saraband on 12 May 2020. You can pre-order it here: https://saraband.net/sb-title/the-scribbler/