Crime fiction has two great traditions, and they could hardly be more different. On one side: Agatha Christie, the puzzle, the closed circle of suspects, the detective who assembles truth from fragments and delivers it with quiet precision. On the other: Raymond Chandler, the hardboiled detective moving through a corrupt world, following a moral code the world around him has largely abandoned, narrating his way through the darkness with a sardonic wit that barely conceals his disgust.
Kerry Costello’s The Long Game draws on both. It is one of the things that makes it unusual — and unusually satisfying.
The Christie Inheritance: A Puzzle Worth Solving
Christie’s great gift to the genre was structural. The clues are present if you are paying attention. The killer is hiding in plain sight. The motive, when finally revealed, illuminates everything that came before it. And the detective — whether Poirot applying his little grey cells or Miss Marple applying her knowledge of human nature — earns the solution through observation and patience rather than luck or force.
The Long Game is built on precisely that structure. Detective Sergeant Gibson investigates what appears to be a natural death in the mining communities of Swinton and Pendlebury in 1990. The official verdict says heart failure. Gibson’s instinct says otherwise. And as he pulls threads, a pattern emerges: former miners dying on the same date, year after year, stretching back through the 1980s, the 1950s, all the way to the Second World War. The killer has constructed something intricate and patient. Unravelling it requires everything Christie’s tradition demands: attention, method and a refusal to accept the obvious explanation.
The Chandler Inheritance: A Detective With a Code
Chandler’s great gift was something different: the detective as moral centre. Philip Marlowe operates in a world of corruption, self-interest and institutional failure. What sets him apart is not brilliance alone but integrity — the refusal to be bought, bent or intimidated. He sees clearly because he has no stake in not seeing. And his voice, sardonic and precise, is the instrument through which the novel’s judgements are delivered.
Gibson carries that quality. He is not a glamorous detective. He works out of a grey police headquarters in Swinton, drives through the rain, argues with his overbearing DCI, and has to fight for every inch of the investigation against institutional indifference. But he will not let it go. His instinct that something is wrong proves stronger than every bureaucratic pressure to close the file. That stubbornness — the detective who keeps going because he cannot in good conscience stop — is pure Chandler, transposed to the industrial North West of England.
What Happens When You Combine Both
The result of putting Christie’s structural rigour together with Chandler’s moral seriousness is a crime novel that offers the satisfactions of the puzzle mystery without the cosiness that sometimes makes the genre feel slight. The Long Game has a real world in it — the mining communities of the North West across five decades, the miners’ strike, the colliery accidents, the bonds and betrayals of men who spent their lives working underground together. The puzzle is embedded in that world. The solution to it carries genuine weight.
If you have always suspected that the best crime fiction combines the intellectual pleasure of the whodunnit with the moral seriousness of the hardboiled tradition, The Long Game is evidence that you were right.
[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]
— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game and the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.