Review: The Yellow Diamond by Andrew Martin

The Yellow Diamond: A Crime of the Super-Rich

By Andrew Martin, Faber & Faber, 320 pages, £15

Although most of us know of Mayfair, many would be hard put to say where its borders lie. It is an anonymous district, like St James’s and Belgravia, that was once the vibrant heart of London, but fell into decline in the 20th century, filled with over-mighty mansions, doctors’ offices, gentlemen’s clubs and stuffy restaurants. It has required a lot of money to restore.

Among Mayfair’s new gentry, people with enough money and ambition to buy entire buildings and fill them with families and servants, are oligarchs from Russia and the Middle East. Did they commit crimes to gain their wealth and are they still committing them? The wealth beat needs a wily detective, keeping watch for fraud and death threats whispered over drinks.

That is the premise of Andrew Martin’s new novel, a departure from his Jim Stringer series of railway detective tales. Down these suffocating streets, filled with “what looked like a modern art exhibition but was in fact a shoe shop” and Ferraris with “the low engine note that marked out the winners of the Mayfair world”, Detective Inspector Blake Reynolds must walk.

It sounds preposterous. In these days of funding cuts and narrow specialisms, why would Scotland Yard appoint a roving wealth inquisitor without portfolio? Apart from being outgunned by the professional services of the rich — lawyers, private bankers, oleaginous PR people — it is mission indefinable.

In literary terms, however, it works nicely. A generalist who sniffs around society haunts can dig up intriguing clues, as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot demonstrated. That was the era before thrillers — inquiry interspersed with spectacular adventure — took over. In everything from his job to his name, Reynolds is a traditionalist.

Other detective novelists have examined the world of new wealth in London, notably Oliver Harris, in his Nick Belsey series starting with 2011’s “The Hollow Man”. Belsey is more junior and aggressive than Reynolds. The latter wants to follow — up to a point — in the well-shod footsteps of a detective superintendent with expensive tastes who was shot in St James’s Park while reading the “Financial Times”.

Aspirations are dangerous in Mayfair. They make you vulnerable to the temptation of being bought by people with very deep pockets. Soon, Reynolds runs across the path of a Russian oligarch who may not be all that he seems. He has a daughter — attractive as it happens — who was involved in a diamond heist and takes a shine to Reynolds, which makes life complicated.

The book takes some time to get going, partly because Martin gives the sense of trying to find his tone. Like an impressionist whose accents drift, there are touches of everything from Sayers and Christie to Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling’s thriller-writing nom-de-plume — a mash-up of jauntiness, melancholy and mystery.

He settles on one, and the story kicks into gear, when Anna Samarina, the oligarch’s daughter, arrives. Then Mayfair — “an excitingly decadent medieval village, with the Ritz Hotel as the castle on the fringe” — lights up. The mystery itself is serviceable, but the writing and his portrayal of characters trapped in a bubble, both venal and confused, transcend it.

“Were you not sent a personal storyboard?” asks the appalling PR adviser at one point, and Martin captures the sense in corners of London society of everyone following the script of an expensive piece of fiction, having abandoned or forgotten wherever they came from. They can buy new clothes, connections and cars at the wave of a hand, but identity is harder.

In this territory, any author bumps up against John le Carré and Martin is not in his league. But he does possess a drily beautiful turn of phrase in his description of how the wealthy live now: “The women in the Lounge wore skimpy clothes — almost as much in the way of jewellery as clothes. Reynolds was reminded of slaves of ancient Rome, in togas and chains.”

The Reynolds of the second half deserves another adventure. Martin has found his voice and his manor at the heart of refurbished London.

–Financial Times