The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly
As you know, I love a long, languorous murder mystery that I can lose myself in; and as you also know, The Sunday Times Culture section is where I often go for some guidance about the latest additions to this genre. This recent recommendation seemed to tick my boxes; however, I didn’t quite get what I expected from this interesting hybrid of a book.
There is a murder mystery at its heart but for a lot of the time this takes a back seat to the dynamics that exist between two artists and their closely entwined families in Hampstead. To that end, this is more of a literary novel (whatever that means) that sometimes messily goes off down different thematic paths but always intrigues. And don’t get me wrong, the murder mystery is properly twisty and engaging. It also has a shifting chronology that I always respond to in murder mysteries and which enables us to understand the evolving bonds and tensions that have developed between the characters over the years.
The story starts in the late 60s with two friends, Frank and Lal. Both are aspiring artists, part of the counterculture, who play with different ideas to make their mark on the scene. Frank achieves popular and financial success with his picture book, The Golden Bones, based on a tragic folk tale of a dead woman and her scattered bones. Commercial to his fingertips, Frank ties the story in with a treasure hunt for seven scattered bones whose locations are cryptically concealed in the book’s text. Over the years this ensures the book’s enduring appeal and provides Frank with a springboard for his other artistic projects.
I have a vague memory of the inspiration for this part of Kelly’s plot, a story book called Masquerade from the late 70s, with a hidden, golden hare. Like Masquerade, Frank’s book inspires a large hard core of fans eager to solve the clues – in this case, called the Bonehunters. It also creates an enduring tabloid story – many of the fans are obsessional and attach a kind of mystical power to collecting the bones which has spilled over in the past to an attack on Frank’s daughter, Nell. However, as the book jumps forward to the present day, Frank is holding an event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication and it is expected that he will reveal the location of the final hidden bone, a golden sculpture of a girl’s pelvic bone, to end the mystery.
Of course, the event does not go to plan and instead of a denouement for the famous picture book, we have the beginnings of a murder mystery. That is only the half of it, though, as several other plot strands spring from this set up. There’s Nell, now a woman in her thirties, who was so traumatised by the attack on her and the circus surrounding the book, that she has withdrawn from the family and lives an impoverished, artistic life on a narrow boat.
She is our main point of view in the book but is unable to provide the reader with a clear focus on the murder mystery. That’s because she is trying to look after Billy, the teenage daughter of one of her former, feckless boyfriends, whom Nell wants to protect from the dysfunctional life that she seems destined to fall into.
Then there’s Frank, a serial adulterer who has moved on and upwards from the picture book to become a grand man of British art. The key event that transformed his reputation was an exhibition of acclaimed portraits of the women he had slept with that had occurred twenty years earlier. The problem is: the murder uncovered at the 50th anniversary seems to be linked to that event.
There’s also a rather odd bohemian set up in Hampstead, with Frank and his family living an entwined existence with his artistic soul mate, Lal, and his family. They party, create art and all live, rather incestuously, in one another’s pockets, with Frank’s son marrying Lal’s daughter. There is creative tension as well as loyalty and love that links the two artists; and, of course, there are also a series of secrets and deceptions that are gradually revealed as the police and the family try to make sense of the past murder uncovered at the book celebration.
As I said, there’s a lot going on that often takes you away from the central mystery. And that’s before factoring in the colour added by the bunch of fantasists and obsessives chasing the final skeleton bone. As a result, the narrative can seem to meander on occasions, although there is always an enlightening flashback or twist to focus one’s attention back to the murder.
If you like a mystery with a remorseless working out of the plot and a pervasive sense of dread as in scandi-noir books for example, then the bagginess of this narrative may not be for you. The forays into the art world, fandom, family dynamics, amongst this book’s myriad interests, turned it into the languorous read I was looking for. At times, I lost sight of the mystery but I was always curious to see how the cast of flawed, complex characters would resolve the problems that Frank set running – and not just for the Bonehunters - when he created The Golden Bones.
Perhaps if you enjoyed Galbraith’s recent Cormorant Strike novels that wander off down various byways before strolling back onto the crime’s main path, then this could be the book for you.