Kashmira Majumdar's Reviews > Let the Dead Lie

Sometimes, bias (and nostalgia) tacks on an extra star at the end. I spent the entire experience of re-reading this book feeling one way, and talking to my friend made me see it another way.

I love detective thrillers with atypical main characters, especially ones that shine a light on a gilded-over part of history. There was Blood & Sugar (soldier of the British Empire forced to confront how sugar barons made their money) and The Way of All Flesh (budding med student during the time of popularisation of anaesthesia), and of course, the Bernie Rhodenbarr series (which has nothing to do with anything, except that it’s about a burglar who gets framed for murders and has to keep solving them).

Emmanuel Cooper, hero of a series that I put off reading for actual years and then voraciously exhausted cover to cover, is a former soldier and former policeman with too much privilege and investment in justice in apartheid era South Africa. If I went back and re-read the other books, I’m not sure how I would feel about them now. Today.

In Let the Dead Lie, he’s lost everything he had in the first book (A Beautiful Place to Die): (view spoiler)[his job as a detective sergeant with the Johannesburg police, his false classification as a white man, and the friends who saved his life. (hide spoiler)] He’s working in the docks, and doing undercover work for an old superior, spying on corrupt cops in Durban (which is all of them everywhere in the country), when he gets caught up in a murder.

True to the series, he’s got to dodge other pigs who care about scapegoats and not answers, and he’s given a deadline before the wrong person is named as the murderer. This time, it’s going to be him. (And if these books have a plus point, it’s that there are several very creative euphemisms for capital punishment, and all of them give me nightmares.) The plot is not convoluted, and it’s a great example of how real life investigations are less Poirot and more like chasing dead ends and leads that take you to other leads. It’s gumshoe PI work, and I love it as much as a classic whodunit.

Another strength of the series is the no-holds-barred tackling of both race and class relations. The line that will stick with me because of its very specific phrasing:

How elemental and comforting to believe that wrongdoing could be identified by a physical trait.

This book has Emmanuel experiencing all the hardships of his past without the brief cover of privilege and protection he once enjoyed. Doing anything, going anywhere, or even sitting down makes him a criminal. We get long glimpses into his past, his childhood as a biracial kid in an all-white boarding school, some more of his time at war. More compellingly, we get to see more of South African urban society, where Emmanuel runs into the Indian community.

This is kind of where it starts to unravel. One lot, the Duttas, are great. There’s a matriarch who’s both sensible and a criminal hustler, a dumb wannabe gangster, a dumb younger son, and their muscle. They’re not perfect specimens, but they’re three-dimensional. Their enemy, the Bigger Bad, is a Mr. Khan, and his only redeeming quality is that he’s successful. He’s a bigger, better gangster than the Duttas, but he’s also vile. And if he was Hindu or the Duttas were Muslim, I’d be all for it. Grey versus grey morality? Bring it on! The series does that perfectly. In this instance, and I am almost sure it was one of those unhappy cases of Unfortunate Implications, the only Muslim character being a moustache-twirling villain felt awful. It’s right up there with how the only black characters we spend time with in this book are successful criminals or policemen. (There’s Emmanuel, but he’s a different story.) The intent is there. I can feel it. But I can only see it through frosted glass.

Another case of Unfortunate Implications is Emmanuel’s constant longing to have his old life back. I mean, I get it. This guy has always had the short end of the stick. When his white-passing privilege got him classified as a white on his identity papers, it changed his life. And he knows it sucks. There are a thousand good scenes across all four books, hammering home the message that Emmanuel Cooper is an antihero. For example, when one of the aforesaid old friends shows up in Durban during his hour of need:

It would have taken Shabalala and his wife two days of hard travel on ailing public buses with cornbread and boiled eggs wrapped in cloth for sustenance on the journey. Emmanuel pushed away the feeling of shame. The Valley of a Thousand Hills was an easy two-hour drive from Stamford Hill.

(And this is not even one of the more unsubtle moments where he’s realising he’s turning into exactly the people he hates. He continues because he tells himself there’s no other way out. I, the reader, differ.)

Emmanuel knows he’s gaming the system when other people can’t and are suffering from it. He fights to be a good ally to them, and uses his privilege For Justice. Except he spends this whole book wishing he was a detective sergeant again because while literally every other cop is corrupt, he knows his own motives are good. There’s even a part where he’s watching a raid, and thinking how the foot police enforce the very laws that he hates, but the detective branch is about justice.

BRUH, NO, THE DETECTIVE BRANCH IS FRAMING INNOCENT PEOPLE FOR MURDER, BEATING THEM UP AT HOME AND IN POLICE CUSTODY, AND APPEASING WHITE PEOPLE. YOU LITERALLY SAW IT HAPPEN TO OTHER PEOPLE AND TO YOURSELF. IT KEEPS HAPPENING TO YOU ACROSS FOUR WHOLE BOOKS.

I’m just unsure whether to see Emmanuel as an unreliable narrator, as my friend suggests, who you’re not supposed to root for. Her theory is that the true voice of conscience is Emmanuel’s friend, Dr. Daniel Zweigman. And Dr. Zweigman is an excellent example of how this author writes nuance well. His backstory is (view spoiler)[also about profiting from privilege until you lose everything because of arrogance (hide spoiler)]. Dr. Zweigman doesn’t spend two seconds wishing for his old life back. Dr. Zweigman wants to use his skills for good. Learn from Dr. Zweigman, Emmanuel! I mean, I’d say that was the whole point of this book, if he didn’t get his old job back at the end of it. I think nostalgia suckered me into reading copaganda.

It’s not all downhill, though. Every single character is written with incredible empathy, and the pigs are three-dimensional villains. By which I mean they’re both smart and realistic, so they’re twice as dangerous. Women drive the story this time, including the Dutta women who are all no-nonsense and pragmatic and truly deserve to run the family business and relegate the men to errand boys. There’s Lana Rose (whattaname) who’s gorgeous (especially in men’s trousers), knows it, self-confident, and lets herself be some guy’s mistress because she’s fleecing him for the money she needs for her independence. And she knows guns and cars, which she learnt because her father wanted a boy, and Emmanuel gets a hard-on from all these facts because that’s the kind of guy he is.

Unreliable narrator, I chant in my head as I read these passages. I do not think of the “Men Writing Women” starter pack.

Bottom line: I understand the meaning of the Goodreads term “3.5 stars”. I’m on the fence about this book. It’s deeply immersive and so well-written (except its little love affair with improbable epithets). It’s an unflinching look at South Africa, but that also means looking at the main character and the book itself through the same lens. Is this how formerly untroubled fans of Brooklyn Nine-Nine feel?