The Man With No Face (1981/2019)
By Peter May
Quercus, 406 pages
★★★
I quite enjoy the thrillers and mysteries from Scottish novelist Peter May. The Man With No Face was an early effort that was reprinted after May gained renown as a British television writer, took the dosh, and then returned to fulltime writing. His Lewis trilogy is a personal favorite. The Man With No Face isn’t up to that standard, but it’s still a good read.
The centerpiece of this murder mystery is Neil Bannerman, a journalist with the Edinburgh Post. Bannerman is a fine reporter, but he’s also jaded, tart of tongue, and all-round pain in the keister. Not surprisingly, he lives alone. He is especially cynical of Tait, an editor who is really a cost-cutting hatchet man. Tait would love to get rid of Bannerman, but he’s too good to dump without a really good reason.
Instead, Tait packs Bannerman off to Brussels to cover a big EEC (European Economic Community) conference which, for an investigative reporter like Bannerman, is akin being assigned to covering local school board meetings. He encounters a group of smug embedded reporters who turn in stories that differ little from press releases and are content to treat their gravy gig as if they are at Club Med on an expense account. It takes Bannerman less than a day to offend virtually every reporter in Brussels. That includes his contact Tim Slater in whose apartment he is staying.
Slater is in tight with British Cabinet minister Robert Gryffe. Bannerman doesn’t care for him much either, but things get much more interesting when both Slater and Gryffe are found dead in the latter’s townhouse. Local police investigate and conclude the two shot each other during a quarrel. You don’t have to be as dogged as Bannerman to doubt that conclusion. As it transpires, there was a hidden witness to the dual slayings, Gryffe’s severely autistic young daughter Tania. She doesn’t speak, but she’s a precocious artist who drew the incident. The problem with her sketch is that the man who isn’t one of the victims has no discernible face.
Bannerman’s investigations will take him down several unexpected paths, not the least of which is that Tania seems at ease with Neil, whereas she goes into a shell or screams when she is in the company of anyone of than her (now-dead) father and her nanny/caregiver Sally. About Sally, how is it that a confirmed misanthrope like Neil finds himself increasingly attracted to her or feeling protective of Tania? At least he can exercise his bile toward Platt, once a promising reporter but now a loser who holds his tongue to scrounge background assignments from other derisive reporters.
A lot happens, not the least of which is that an amoral assassin named Kale would like to plant both Neil and Tania. But for whom is he a contract killer? That involves following leads that might yield Bannerman a major scoop. Every crumb he follows yields another layer of complexity. He comes to expect that a reclusive but respected Swiss entrepreneur René Jansen is too good to be true. Eventually he will enter a world of deadly and dirty politics in which even the men in shadows have an overlord.
Okay, so maybe we too jaded these days to be shocked by the idea that power, politics, and crime might be linked, but by having a lot of threads in need of being tied together, May’s 1981 plot holds up well. I’ll leave it to you to decide how well the twists involving Kale and Tania ring true. Younger readers will just have to trust me when I say that once upon a time there really were crusading journalists who wrote for pulped products called newspapers. Oh wait, was that cynical?
Rob Weir
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