The Various Haunts of Men

The Various Haunts of Men
By
Susan Hill
A Review

Nobody is safe in a Susan Hill novel. Her gothic stories supply answers to her desperate protagonists, but in the end, the riddles are insoluble and the horror is inexorable. So, when Hill takes up the traditional detective novel, the middle-class security blanket, is she really going to make readers warm and fuzzy?

With The Various Haunts of Men, Hill introduces CID Simon Seerailler. She yokes the CID up with a subordinate, DS Graffam in the little town of Laffeter, but the pairing is so unlike say, Elizabeth George's Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers, there's something amiss, most definitely. Will this arrangement actually survive the book? In fact, DS Graffam, whose only interaction with Seerailler is to occasionally update him on her work, does all the investigating, and Seerailler only steps in at the end.

Graffam, the investigating officer in a missing persons case, is new to the town and utterly lonely. She's gone through a trying divorce and pines for a new life/love. Seerailler immediately strikes her as a potential lover, but she's too frightened to hit on her superior. She stews in silence with her girlhood crush. Seerailler has lived in the village all his life. He comes from a family of medical doctors. The black sheep in the family, he makes a living at his second love, police work, but his first love is art. Graffam, with her debilitating crush, is at the center of the book, setting up an odd, tragic story. The author gives interesting accounts of the victims and a fair amount of space to her creepy killer too.

As the number of missing women increases, Graffam becomes convinced that a serial killer is at work. The first two missing women are oddballs, single for their own reasons; their eccentric lifestyles make them of little interest to the police. Only Graffam and the missing women's friends suspect foul play, and Graffam wishes she could find more evidence to raise a general alarm.

As the serial killer takes another victim, the author sets up Seerailler's professional medical family against a bevy of New Age Health gurus, alternative medicine practitioners and psychics, and entertains us with a phony séances and a district full of New Age retailers with strange products for sale. Seerailler's sister, a doctor in the area, suspects something terrible has happened to one of her patients, and unaware of Graffam's investigation, starts her own, with a head full of significant generalizations about any practice not sanctioned by the medical community.
 

The mystery keeps you reading. A great twist at the end is worthwhile. Setting her story in a cathedral town might be closer to Hill's gothic novels. It recalls RM James stories, where black, moody monsters live in every nook and cranny. Through Simon Seerailler, Hill manages to bring the quirks and nuances of the little village to light, although the pursuit of a maniacal killer whose gruesome acts appall the community are unquestionably part of the police procedural genre.