Peak District Detective Mystery
Claws by Stephen Booth Covers Crimes on Birds of Prey in Derbyshire
Sep 7, 2008
Stephen Booth has been highly praised for his detective novels set in Derbyshire's Peak District National Park. They evoke an area that is remarkably beautiful but which can also be sinister and unsettling, with its rugged crags, occasional mists and vast stretches of moorland. It's a landscape that's ripe as a setting for crime and mystery, and Booth has written several full-length novels that make full use of this haunting background.
Crime Express
Claws is different. It is set in the same locale, and features one of the author's regular characters, Detective Constable Ben Cooper, but it is more of a long short story in the attractive pocket-sized Crime Express series launched by Nottingham's Five Leaves Publications. At 96 pages and scarcely bigger than a CD case, there are few pockets or purses that Claws wouldn't fit into.
Claws begins in the small bedroom of a terraced house in a Derbyshire mining village. DC Ben Cooper is examining some tiny and delicate bones – not human bones, though, but those of a small bird. The room is filled with boxes of birds' eggs, the skulls of dead birds, and the recently dead body of a young goshawk taken from its nest. But of the house's occupant Kevin Hewitt, there's no sign.
Rural Crime
For this crime mystery DC Ben Cooper has been seconded to the Rural Crime Team, and has to learn fast about the murky world of egg thieves and the buyers and sellers of birds of prey. There is some rather clumsy exposition, as the reader too has to be filled in quickly about the law, the law-breakers, and the latest police techniques in tackling them. But that done, the author then plays to his strengths – characters and landscapes.
Booth's skill is in making the reader understand a character like Kevin Hewitt, despite his criminal record and his obvious involvement in egg-stealing and bird-thieving. Hewitt has a wife and children that he is separated from but loves, and has a secret that turns out to be rather touching. Few characters in Claws are black and white: some of the 'bad guys' have redeeming qualities, and some of the 'good guys' are not beyond bending the rules.
Convincing Descriptions of Derbyshire
Booth's descriptions of Derbyshire are totally convincing, whether describing a run-down housing estate or the Dark Peak moorland where much of the action takes place. We follow Cooper as he meets birdwatchers and gamekeepers, and we see the petty criminal Hewitt as he carries out one more theft, knowing he's getting a little too old to be shinning up trees to birds' nests.
Part of the sub-text of Claws is the way in which human lives resemble or differ from the lives of the birds of prey. Hewitt knows, for example, that he is at the bottom of the pecking order, as it were, and it's no accident that the book centres on the stealing of goshawks. The birds mate for life and hunt in pairs, and one of their traits of behavior provides Cooper with one of his clues.
Claws might be short but it packs all the qualities of a novel into its 96 pages. Anyone who has read Booth's full-length works won't want to miss this, and anyone having their first taste of it is sure to go looking for more.
Practical Information
Claws costs £4.99 in the UK, $10 in the USA, and is available on Amazon or from the Five Leaves website.
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