Recent Reading: A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

Readers of Allan's novels, as well as her excellent blog, will have for some time been aware of her growing interest in crime fiction and non-fiction. It's not a surprise, then, that her latest book veers away from the fantastic genres and towards crime writing, and it is equally unsurprising that the result is both excellent and entirely idiosyncratic, a book that stretches our definitions of "novel" and "non-fiction" in equal measure. A Granite Silence begins in an autofictional mode, with a narrator presumed to be Allan taking a trip to Aberdeen to research a new novel in one of the early lulls in the pandemic. There she learns about the 1934 murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly, who disappeared and was later found dead in her working class tenement building. It's a case that still simmers in the city's consciousness, and has been written about extensively in legal academic circles. 

This opening segment quickly becomes a compelling, gripping description of the crime—all the more so because of how Allan's focus subtly shifts with each chapter. Some are straightforward, blow by blow descriptions of events as Helen disappears and her parents raise the alarm, told with a dry remove that is incredibly readable while still conveying the horror of an ordinary child, family, and neighborhood's life being irretrievably disrupted. Others are told from the point of view of the planned protagonist of Allan's novel, a Russian émigré working as a journalist in Aberdeen, who joins the press gaggle as the media frenzy around the case builds. Some chapters discuss the wider context of the crime and its investigation—Aberdeen's importance as a port and shipbuilding hub and its growing, upwardly mobile working class; the developing role of forensics in criminal investigation and jurisprudence; the evolution of the press's role in discussing and propagating narratives about crime. Other times, the focus drills deep down, as in a chapter that is a minute description of a police photo of the murderer's sitting room, which is both an opportunity for Allan to muse about the class signifiers embodied in home furnishings, and a meditation on how an image that contains no depiction of violence nevertheless carries a startling charge when one is aware of its connection to a horrific crime.

Through these various perspectives, Allan builds a comprehensive portrait of the hours and days following Helen's murder, following along with the investigation and leading readers to the—never terribly mysterious—conclusion of who the murderer must be. It's at this point, however, that A Granite Silence makes its most surprising departure from the conventions of the true crime genre. The next few chapters are a set of short stories (and thus reminiscent of Allan's fiction, in which she often interrupts the flow of a novel with short stories) fictionalizing various figures in the case. An early incident in the life of the murderer, which may or may not shed light on emotional tendencies that eventually led to the crime. An aspiring journalist who arrives in Aberdeen hoping to make her name (and break into a male-dominated field) and instead finds herself stumbling onto a completely different mystery. A forensics expert whose work on the case dredges up memories of a still-unresolved incident from his war service. There's a lot of genre-play in these chapters, which veer from social realism to pulp horror to folklore, while still holding the case at their center. Each is gripping in its own right, but their juxtaposition reminds us of how much crime writing—whether it acknowledges its fictionality or pretends to be representing reality—is a work of invention, of storying events that are ultimately chaotic, and trying to make a comprehensible character out of a person who has done the unimaginable, as a way of allaying our anxieties about those acts.

There's been a lot of conversation, much of it vitriolic, about the growth of true crime as a genre and its often baleful influence on its readers. The way that it encourages the gamification of criminal investigation, treating horrific events as merely a backdrop to their investigators' self-actualization. Allan doesn't address most of these criticisms head-on—she acknowledges that there is something inherently exploitative about her choice to write about Helen and her killer, but doesn't seem to feel that there is much more to say on this matter (though the book's continued forays into autofiction, following Allan as she burrows through archives and contacts the descendants of major figures in the case, are always there to remind us of the inherent artificiality of the narrative we are reading, and the inevitable distance that exists between it and the truth). But in its choice of case, A Granite Silence seems to be making some pointed observations about the types of murder that the true crime industry is interested in, and how that interest can warp our understanding of what actually happened. Helen Priestly's murder was a cause célèbre in Aberdeen in the days and months after her death, and her killer was so intensely vilified in the press that the trial had to be held in Edinburgh. And yet as Allan notes as she tries to dig up information about them, the people who were most affected by this crime—Helen's family and the murderer's family—slip entirely from the historical record. Without their perspective, the crime is merely a bit of entertainment, one that the press quickly loses interest in. By the time the Home Office makes some rather startling decisions about the murderer's sentencing (decisions that, shockingly to a modern reader, appear not to have involved Helen's parents at all) nobody in Aberdeen seems to care.

And perhaps they're right not to, because as Allan slowly and persuasively argues, the case of Helen Priestly isn't horrific or sensationalistic, but sad and senseless. Her murderer isn't a monster, but depressingly ordinary. Its aftermath has more to do with the logistics of the prison and legal system than high-flying concepts like justice or right and wrong. When Allan painstakingly tracks down an interview with the murderer (who lived into the 1970s, a reminder that the reverberations of many of these "historical" crimes carry on well into the modern era) she finds no insight, no key to the pointless destruction of two families; just a person who has lived their life, which includes an interval that to most of us seems unimaginable, but which in reality is just a thing that happens to some people.

(For all that, there came a point where Allan's—understandable, and to some extent necessary—sympathy for the murderer left me behind. It's hard to say more about this without discussing specific details of the case, but Helen Priestly's death turns out to have combined genuine mishap with profound indifference and even cruelty. When you examine the case as a whole—under Allan's clear-sighted and comprehensive guidance—it ultimately feels as if the legal system ended up, almost by accident, delivering just the right degree of punishment. But nevertheless I found it difficult to read about the murderer leaving prison and going on with their life, a difficulty that finds no mirror in Allan's narrative.)

A Granite Silence makes one more foray into fiction in its final chapter, with a story that imagines a living Helen, making her way in the post-war years, trying to decide between pursuing a career and marrying a man with whom she feels a deep connection. A quintessential upwardly mobile young woman in mid-20th century Britain, except that this woman never existed—never got the chance to exist. It's a reminder, once again, of how much fiction plays a role in our understanding of crime, and of how that understanding is inevitably warped by the process of fictionalization. At the same time, it's a reminder of the real cost of even the most mundane, pathetic acts of violence, the lives and worlds snuffed out by a moment's carelessness and lack of compassion. It has always been this ability, to make us sit with the sadness of a crime rather than its sensationalism, that Allan has most admired about the work of writing about it. It is no surprise that in her first foray into the form, she has managed, in her own inimitable way, to capture it.