The Birdwatcher

Crime novels are not my usual fare, but after reading about William Shaw’s The Birdwatcher at Café Society, I picked it up on an early summer afternoon to find myself absorbed.

The birdwatcher, William South, is also a detective; he believes that the note-taking techniques developed for birdwatching are also useful to the accumulation of detail he needs in his work for the Kentish police force. His story is interspersed with a story from his childhood in northern Ireland, until the two come together as he reveals the mystery of what can drive a person to kill and solves the mystery of who killed his friend and fellow birdwatcher.

The accumulation of detail serves William’s purpose, but it does produce an occasional dead end, significant in the way of details revealed in fiction only for revealing something about the state of the protagonist’s mind. For example:
“he saw ahead of him an old black Rover 90. Normally he wouldn’t have even noticed the car. Today it looked shiny and malign. Familiar.
It was driving at 40 m.p.h. along the clearway. As he passed it, South’s hands tightened on the wheel and he felt his stomach turning somersaults, but when he looked left, all he saw was a woman of about seventy dressed in a pink lace hat, hands on the steering wheel. She turned and smiled at him.
What was wrong with him? It was just a car.”
In the next chapter, told from the point of view of his younger self, Billy, we relive a frightening memory of a man who gets out of “a black Rover 90, one of those old-fashioned, round, heavy cars his father hated.”

Even the birds he sees reveal William’s state of mind:
“the redwings were starting to come through in larger numbers now. He sat in his police car at Greatstone and watched some brent geese passing far out at sea. The swallows were still going south in numbers, later than usual this year. Nothing was reliable. Something was broken.”

In the end, which comes much more quickly than I expected, William’s personal and professional lives come together over his concern for the daughter of a colleague:
“He walked down the road trying to guess which house the party would have been in. If he did find out which house it was, what was he planning to do? He was not sure. People here had money. This was an enclave of the rich. Excuse me, but are your friends bullying a policeman’s daughter?”
He follows his instincts, which have been developed by the habit of noticing if a bird is out of place, and finally the reader gets the satisfaction of seeing him find the murderer of his friend and “confronting him with the fact that everything he’d built up was a lie,” which applies to more than one of the characters in the novel.

Full of suspense, red herrings, and an albino buzzard, this could be the one crime novel you want to read this year.