Tell Tale

Claire Parkin

WHEN you have a (well-earned!) reputation as the village snooper, busybody and all-round ten-year-old troublemaker, how on earth do you convince your sceptical elders that you are the sole witness to a murder?

After the huge success of her debut book, The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe – a darkly comic novel about two elderly women’s lifelong, toxic friendship and the fine line between love and hate – Claire Parkin (pictured below) returns with a wonderfully visceral and boldly original comedy murder mystery set in her Welsh homeland during the miners’ strike of 1984.

Tell Tale stars an angry, straight-talking, innately clever girl from a deprived home whose payback for her life lived as a virtual outcast is to spy on the folk in her well-heeled Welsh village and manipulate, purely for her own amusement, rising community tensions from the industrial unrest. The result is a story full of a child’s raw honesty, boundless mischief and uncompromising worldview set alongside a searing, and often colourful, insight into the lives of those caught up in the feuds, scandals and gossip of small village life, and the struggles and bitterness of a hard-hitting strike. 

In Wales in 1984, in the small village of Llanfair – a place of handsome red-brick Victorian villas and trimmed front lawns – the most notorious busybody, young Debbie-Marie Tunstall, a victim of the bullies from an early age, has really gone and done it this time. 

Trying to blackmail the vicar and putting senna into the sandwiches of two girls in her school class, which landed them in hospital, were maybe – just maybe – two steps too far.

And now that her merciless announcements of the observations she records in her much-cherished Kajagoogoo notebook have got her into so much trouble that even her single parent mum can’t defend her, Debbie has been referred to child psychologist Dr Vanessa Bridges to save her from being expelled from school.  

But not all the residents of Llanfair are unsympathetic to Debbie… former headteacher Barbara Pritchard – who swore on her retirement that she would rather ‘sell her soul to Satan’ than face a child or its ‘ghastly parents’ ever again – regards Debbie as a different kettle of fish. Frank, fearless and feisty, this girl, she concludes, is a ‘misunderstood genius.’

And Barbara’s 31-year-old nephew Robert Hargreaves, a bartender at his dad’s pub in Llanfair, is himself a victim of childhood bullying. He is still grieving the death of his beloved mother a year ago and Debbie counts him as one of her friends as he is always willing to talk to her.

But her latest snooping and mischief has left even her few friends baffled and Debbie feels she has no choice but to run away into ‘the wilderness,’ only to find herself the sole witness to a murder. And from a decades-old tragedy to the immediate danger of a potential serial killer on the loose, Debbie decides to take it upon herself to piece together both the recent murder and the older mystery. Problem is that even if she uncovers the truth, will anyone believe the village’s biggest tell-tale? Because in Llanfair, secrets are buried just beneath the surface, and what Debbie has inadvertently stumbled upon could unravel the very fabric of her community…

Parkin brings us a cast of larger-than-life characters – some of them the familiar stalwarts of any small village and others who are instantly recognisable as the disruptors and aggressors – as a ruthless killer wreaks havoc on the residents of Llanfair. Written through the alternating first person perspective of the irrepressible and delightfully knowing Debbie and the third person accounts of child psychologist Vanessa, who has a genuine sense of purpose to help kids like Debbie, retired headmistress Barbara who alone recognises the child’s intelligence, and caring but self-doubting Robert, unearthing the murderer’s identity gradually comes full circle.

But also at the heart of the story is the dichotomy between the neighbouring villages of Llanfair and Barwood. They might only be three miles apart but it could well be three thousand miles, with mining village Barwood closely bound by a profound solidarity over the strike, and Llanfair boasting the most prosperous population in the county and yet still unhappy with its lot.

Packed with nostalgia-laden references to the social life and times of the Eighties, featuring a delightful brand of dark humour juxtaposed with some weighty emotional grit, and armed with a growing sense of suspense, a few unexpected twists and turns, and a delightful sting in its tail, this is a murder mystery to read and relish.
(Macmillan, hardback, £20)