Phil Rickman and Merrily Watkins
During the course of the summer I have been working my way through the more recent novels in Phil Rickman's "Merrily Watkins" series except for one, The Remains of an Altar, which I've not been able to get hold of so far. Over the past year or so I've been reading a wide variety of crime and mystery fiction and have found these to be head and shoulders above almost all of the competition.

What I've found especially pleasing is the way Rickman is able to truly evoke a particular landscape, Herefordshire and the southern Welsh Marches, with which I'm familiar. In addition, he skillfully and evocatively weaves into his stories a deep knowledge of local history and folklore - indeed these are almost invariably central to the plot rather than being merely local colour. His use of the Templar links at Garway, the Arthur Conan Doyle links with Baskerville Hall, now a hotel, near Hay-on-Wye and the spectral black hound legend associated with Hergest Ridge, for example.

There is a strong undercurrent of horror in these novels (indeed, Rickman's earliest works were more purely works of horror) which in some respects takes mystery and creepy literature back to its roots. The earliest literary horror depended very heavily on folklore and place, on ghosts and the supernatural, but around the middle of the 19th century the focus of horror and suspense literature largely evolved from figures of folklore to a terror and dread of the unseen and unknown. (See Dark Green: Some disturbing thoughts about faeries for more about this.) Although there have been further developments since then (for many writers and film-makers the object of terror has become the flesh and blood serial killer), Rickman's work takes us back into the realm of folklore and re-envigorates an influence and inspiration that has been largely ignored for a century and a half.

In other ways, too, Rickman takes us back to the early days of gothic literature - the villages and isolated settlements and farmhouses of his Herefordshire and the Marches include a regular quota of inbred locals, many of whom are dangerously barking thanks to a shortage of branches in the family tree. His scenes are set in ruined churches and chapels and on lonely hill-tops, and his heroine dwells in an ancient and delapidated vicarage which mirrors the crumbling castles and mansions of the gothic period. And so on.

There are other influences too - modern paganism, fertility and folk music (especially that of the late Nick Drake), as well as contemporary events and society: one of the novels skirts round Fred and Rosemary West and the Cromwell Street murders, while another, written in the early years of the Blair government, satirises "New Labour" in the form of a tracksuit-clad and presentation-obsessed, but ultimately corrupt and dangerous, Bishop of Hereford.

What Rickman's novels have that other writers' don't is a complexity of theme and treatment, a deep layering of ideas and a sophistication in the way that the various strands of the story are pulled together. There are very few whodunnits which could be re-read with complete satisfaction, but these undoubtedly can. Long may he continue to write them.