Darkness Rising is the fourth in Frank Tallis’s series of detective novels set in early twentieth-century Vienna. Max Liebermann is a young psychoanalyst who uses the skills of this new discipline to assist his friend, Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt. This is a collaboration typical of the genre; writers presumably enjoy the idea that creative and intellectual types might be of some use to officials and authority figures after all.
This latest adventure starts with the apparently superhuman or supernatural decapitation of a monk outside one of Vienna’s churches. Further violent beheadings follow, against a backdrop of ethnic tension and political skulduggery. Kabalists, Hasidic Jews, secular Jews, old-fashioned Jews and liberated modern Jewish women are all encountered, and the atheist Liebermann, who has disappointed his family by his choice of profession, his broken engagement and his lack of faith, is slowly brought by events to consider his heritage more carefully.
One of the charms of Tallis’s books has been their evocation of Viennese life just after 1900: anti-Semitism, etiquette, low and high politics, Freud, Chopin and Schnitzler (who appear as characters), waltzes, syphilis, duelling, art galleries, coffee houses, and – persistently – detailed descriptions of pastries and cakes. He employs a stiff, mannered diction, in keeping with his characters’ formal speech. Distinctions of class, and other prejudices, are consistently presented. And across each page, the shadow of Austria’s near-future adds its grim dramatic irony (“Today, Jews may be insulted and abused – but they will never be consigned to the flames again”).
There are passages here, however, where the social backdrop takes centre stage and the plot vanishes behind it. Liebermann’s romantic life, tensely and compellingly handled in the first two books, has settled into a glacially paced non-courtship of a reserved, intellectual Englishwoman. The musical evenings enjoyed by Liebermann and Reinhardt have begun to test one’s patience. There is a feeling that Tallis, having done so much research, is reluctant to leave any of it out.
In the earlier books, the plots were more complex. The crowd of extras allowed for numerous suspects and false trails, and also several subplots which were enjoyable in their own right. (The incidental reappearance of two suspects from Mortal Mischief in Vienna Blood, to dispatch artfully an otherwise untouchable cad, was a treat). But Darkness Rising is less busy in every sense. One hopes that this is just an adagio.