I first heard of Matt Bendoris at Crimefest where he was moderating a panel on tech in crime writing.
I liked his approach, his questions and his description of his second novel ‘DM for Murder’. (I think it was partially the idea of Piers Morgan being no more…) Unfortunately, having read the book, I think I was seduced by the delightfully crimey and bookish atmosphere around me into purchasing a book that I’m not sure I would have taken home with me if I’d even read through the first chapter.
What’s it about?
Professional pot-stirrer Bryce Horrigan, otherwise known as an outrageous media darling with a seriously popular chatshow and that rare beast, a successful Brit in America, is dead. This in itself isn’t surprising: lately he’s been persistently upsetting religious fundamentalists and the anti-abortion lobby so deliberately that his own mother has warned him it’ll cause his death. Nor is it surprising that the news of his death is soon trending on twitter. (Bryce loved boasting about the number of death threats he had received via the social media platform.) What is shocking, is that news of Bryce’s demise has been tweeted from his own twitter account, alongside a photo of the crime scene.
As the police investigation develops, Bryce’s twitter account persists in mocking the ‘Clueless Cops’ and calling Bryce a ‘baby killer’. Meanwhile, twitter user Baby Angel begins direct messaging the chief investigating officer, encouraging him to look closely at a particular pro-life campaigner. But who exactly is Baby Angel? Who are the people responsible for the thousands of death threats Bryce received via twitter? And how do you narrow down 10,000 suspects to find one killer?
What’s it like?
Fast-paced, mildly amusing and increasingly ludicrous, with an ending that had me question how someone so evidently deranged had not been locked up yet.
Bendoris is concerned with plot and the social media angle rather than the horror of the crime, so in retrospect I’m not surprised that the opening chapters lacked the dramatic punch you might typically associate with the central victim’s death. Bryce’s death is sidelined in the prologue by descriptions of who he was, and the chapter concludes with a comment that the largest difficulty the police will face will be the death threats on his twitter account.
How do you narrow down 10,000 suspects to find one killer?
I found this kind of use of an omniscicent narrator distracting, and it felt like necessary information was simply dumped on the reader. ‘Here you go! Take it in and move on!’ In order to understand how tweets are being posted from Bryce’s account, we do need to understand about trojans and zombie computers and the like, but I was disappointed that this information couldn’t be more embedded into the storyline. In a novel focused so much on e-tech, it’s perhaps unfair of me to expect all necessary information to be discreetly sprinkled into the story, but this is also symptomatic of Bendoris’ style.
Chapters are short, frequently only one or two pages, and move swiftly between multiple focal characters: two reporters, two investigating officers, Bryce’s understudy, key suspects… Here are the headlines! Here are the main points you need to know! Now we’re moving on! Try to keep up! It was a real ‘of course!’ moment when I reached the end of the book, found the ‘about the author’ section and learned that Bendoris is a senior journalist working for The Sun newspaper.
Final thoughts
If you like fast-paced, humorous crime stories with characters who don’t take themselves too seriously then this would suit you very well. There’s a good amount of detail about the development of the police and the journalist investigations, giving this the feel of a police procedural without the weighty detail that can involve. I grew to enjoy the relationships between the police pair and the journalist pair (though I remain irritated by the way the woman, April, is consistently presented as a bit of an idiot, while her male partner, Connor, gets to be the intelligent (and younger and more attractive) one who groans and wonders aloud how she’s made it this far through life), both of which had a surprising depth to them, given the necessary brevity of all their exchanges.
You don’t need to be familiar with twitter or even particularly au fait with technology to read this. Both April and Captain Sorrell receive crash courses from their respective partners with sufficient detail to illuminate the necessary information to uninitiated readers without boring the knowledgeable ones.
Released in 2015, ‘DM for Murder’ was shortlisted for that year’s Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year Award, so while it wasn’t quite to my taste, it clearly has a broad appeal, and the idea behind it (essentially creating a properly modern ‘digital’ crime story) is certainly timely. It’s also a neat critique of the complete corruption fame can engineer, as multiple characters insist that the much-hated Bryce Horrigan, shock jock and very nasty lover, began his career as a genuinely pleasant young man.
This is a quick and easy read, and with the chapters being so incredibly short and focused there’s little doubt that once you’ve started you’ll find you don’t stop for hours. If you like slapstick style humour you’ll find plenty of it, and some easy villains to laugh at, but be warned: you need to be prepared to suspend your disbelief as this caper careers to an end with all the i’s finally dotted and t’s thoroughly crossed.