Book review: Funicular, by T.F. Lince
When a less than buoyant London detective plods from the city to see out the end of his career in a lazy seaside town, he finds he has an abundance of time to sniff around their cold cases.
The location is an anomaly, not only slighted by the shifting boundary of Yorkshire as it abuts the chilling North Sea but with its own exceptions to reality and where hobbyists map the impossible. Although many would tell you that all Yorkshiremen are born impossible, this disappearance mystery is stubborn even by those gentlemen’s world-leading standards.
Then there’s the funicular itself, an eccentric contraption that I’ve only heard of before as ‘a funicular railway’ in The Grand Hotel Budapest (I went on to read Stefan Zweig’s book Society of the Crossed Keys, which didn’t deserve the adulation the film suggested). I guess you might find funicular tramways in continental mountain resorts dating right back to the popularisation of skiing, but discovering the iron and plank water-powered engineering of industrial northern England still in daily use here adds another erratic personality to the story’s atypical atmosphere.
British paranormal mysteries are completely different weasels to the famous big budget international films about paranormal UFO abductions and supernatural poltergeists. Hot Fuzz was an earlier example of a UK city policeman (Simon Pegg) dropped into a small town mystery, but that wasn’t paranormal. Stranger Things, The X-Files and Eerie Indiana were small-town paranormal mystery series but were only ever set in US culture. Modern books in the paranormal, small-town UK niche are much less common and no author has monopolised the market as their own. For those reasons, you cannot say ‘this story is like…’ without setting aside a glaring reason why they are different.
The British roots of this general premise are so deep that they pre-date the English language. The Celts loved this subject, telling their tales of a paranormal faery reality tucked out of sight, just behind our own. They believed that at certain times, such as equinoxes or the twilight, objects or beings could pass between the two worlds as the interface between them weakened and became permeable, through the surface of a glassy pond, the other side of the mirror or a reflection in metal, but most of the ancient myths in this category concern water. Extreme high tides mark the moment here, when the moon’s power runs at its fullest on Earth.
This is a tale that was composed about a fantastical paranormal force but it is told from an ordinary, almost routine perspective, which I found strangely engrossing. Where I’d be flipping up and down and yelling obscenities if I witnessed anything paranormal, these stoic types keep it to themselves or stop for a lemon-topped ice cream on the beach and have a hearty chat. There’s a sense of blokes trying to get along in teams and be accepted, which is a peep behind the public face of the uniform.
Events don’t happen all at once, so there’s an impression of the passage of years and a crime of such ancient depth and unworldly glamour that it’s hard for the detective to corner and finally stop. Justice is unrealistic in the context presented, never really the peaceful community’s expectation, but grasping the rare opportunity to end the tragedy would be good enough for the sturdy copper. He’s got that Sam Gangee (or Sam Vimes) reassuring presence; salt of the earth, always try your best and never let go until the end. Why? — because it is the right thing to do.
The novel is stumble-free, in the sense of exemplary editing and proof reading, with only one solitary spelling mistake in the whole thing (White/Wight). As I run into this issue too often it is refreshing to know there’s an independently published book out there in which you can lose yourself without having your trance broken by petty mistakes.
Well done T.F. Lince, whoever you are. Your story keeps readers on the hook. Have you thought about adapting this into a script? I bet there’d be somebody on Shootingpeople.org, or a similar site, interested in filming it.
