Quint Dalrymple Series by Paul Johnston
Quint Dalrymple #1
Body Politic
Paul Johnston
Edinburgh 2020: After years of rioting and chaos, during which time the United Kingdom was dissolved into dozens of warring city-states, Edinburgh achieves stability thanks to the Council of City Guardians and their vision of a new Age of Enlightenment. It becomes the Body Politic.The Council's goal of a "perfect" city-where television, private cars, and popular music are banned, and where crime is virtually nonexistent-is shattered when a brutal serial killer is discovered among their ranks. Can the fearsome Ear, Nose and Throat Man be back to his grisly old tricks? The usually complacent Council is forced to turn to the man they demoted years ago-the irreverent, blues-haunted Quintilian Dalrymple-to catch the gruesome killer.From Publishers WeeklyThis bleak, near-future hunt for a vicious serial killer won Britain's Creasy Award for best first novel and should capture admiring attention here as well. In the year 2020, Edinburgh is a virtual city-state (founded on the ideas of Plato's Republic) ruled by a benevolently despotic council riddled with corruption. This highly regimented society has lost most traces of individualism. Gone, too, are televisions, private cars, unsanctioned books and musicAas well as most crime, at least until the reemergence of a serial killer known as the ENT (ear, nose and throat) man for his bizarre attentions to his victims. Shocked by the first murder in five years, the council is desperate enough to bring back disgraced private investigator Quintilian Dalrymple, a jazz-loving iconoclast with previous experience of the ENT man. Johnston's spare style doesn't hinder him from effectively limning a society drastically altered by desperate circumstances, and, at the same, spinning a thoroughly entertaining chase novel. Edinburgh's physical and spiritual transformation makes an intriguing backdrop, while Quint, a private eye of the classic mold contending with inept bureaucrats, corruption and a determined killer, makes a first-rate hero. Offbeat but on target, this is one exciting debut. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsEdinburgh, 2020. The Enlightenment that swept through the city years ago has virtually eliminated crime, along with individuality, spontaneity, blues music, and anything citizens might have wanted to do after the 10 p.m. curfew. So it's a matter of considerable concern when the Public Order Directorate discovers that guardswoman Knox 96, a.k.a. Sarah Spence, has been murdered in a way eerily reminiscent of the Ear, Nose, and Throat Man, whose horrible mutilations still haunt the public memory since his last killing five years ago. Edinburgh's official guardians immediately summon Quintilian Dalrymple, who quit the Directorate to work as a Parks laborer and sometime private eye, to clear up the mystery before it affects the tourist trade. But Quint is reluctant to return to his old job, not only because he's just taken on a private clientKatharine Kirkwood, whose brother Adam has been missing for ten daysbut because he knows the rash of murders that's just beginning isn't the work of the ENT Man, whom he killed himself five years ago in revenge for his lover's death. It looks like Quint and Katharine will have to settle for uncovering a sex-slaves racket, medical-research corruption, and an avenger even more ruthless than Quint en route to realizing that ``in the perfect city, the only way to express free will was to commit murder.'' Forget the rickety, overstuffed plot and you'll see why Johnston's bone-chilling dystopia took Britain's John Creasey Award for the year's best crime debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Quint Dalrymple #2
Quint Dalrymple 02 - The Bone Yard
Paul Johnston
The Bone Yard is a dystopian thriller set in Edinburgh during the harsh winter of 2021. Rogue detective Quintilian Dalrymple, a former bureaucrat who left his high-ranking job to work for the parks service and solve mysteries on the side, sets about catching a serial killer with a peculiar signature. The killer bites out the victim's throat, cuts out the tongue, removes the genitals, and leaves in the cavity a cassette of the electric blues of Clapton, Hendrix, and others. In the allegedly crime-free Edinburgh city-state (which is expressly modeled on Plato's Republic, but in practice resembles every cliché of pre-1990 Eastern Bloc regimes), blues music is contraband. So are casual sex, monogamy, fattening foods, all drugs, and more-than-weekly showers. So why does the killer leave cryptic messages via electric blues?Johnston won Britain's John Creasey Award for best first crime novel with 1999's Body Politic, and in The Bone Yard he possibly takes for granted that his readers already know and care about Dalrymple and his cohorts. Character development is scanty, so the playful rivalry between Dalrymple and sidekick Davie, for example, is mostly conveyed through edginess and four-letter words. Their terseness is juxtaposed against the obfuscatory language of the council, the "iron Boy Scouts" who gradually become implicated in the four grisly murders and a related scheme. The serial murderer's infelicitous musical clues lead Dalrymple to discover a dangerous drug remarkably like Viagra, which is being manufactured illegally within the Edinburgh city-state. Dalrymple travels to a zoo, a slaughterhouse, and a foul fishing boat to find the lab, which may be tied to the mysterious "Bone Yard" that the council shrouds in top-level security and secrecy. In addition, a nubile exotic dancer meets an untimely end, leading the two detectives and Dalrymple's tough ex-girlfriend Katharine to the Three Graces sex club, which caters to Edinburgh's rich and burgeoning tourist population. Readers trolling for mysteries set in exciting locales may thus be gratified by The Bone Yard, which is a blend of 1984 (though with inferior prose), The China Syndrome, and Showgirls. The plot moves briskly through dark terrain, both physically and philosophically. It's got a relentlessly downbeat tenor, but Johnston intricately ties together the threads of the four murder victims and their psychopathic killer, and the secret of the Bone Yard. --Kathi Inman Berens
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Quint Dalrymple #3
Quint Dalrymple 03 - Water of Death
Paul Johnston
Things are not ducky in Edinburgh in 2025. Indeed, they've been far from ducky since the financial collapse of 2002, the crippling global warming, the UK's devolution into so many anarchic city-states, and Edinburgh's embrace of the Enlightenment (the ironic name of their dystopian state, controlled by the Council of City Guardians) and its de facto absence of individual liberty.On the bright side, crime's down, tourism's up, and the Edlott lottery (a "citizen's" only shot at betterment) is doing land-office business. A pity, then, that recent winner Fordyce Kennedy's gone missing and Frankie Thomson, a demoted Auxiliary Guardsman, has turned up dead on the banks of the Water of Leith. Ironically, Frankie died of nicotine poisoning after sampling a contraband bottle of "Ultimate Usquebaugh." Usquebaugh is Gaelic for "the water of life," or whisky.Enter Quintilian Dalrymple, Water of Death's noirish, blues-haunted hero, a freelance detective (himself a demotee from the powerful Auxiliary Guard thanks to exploits detailed in 1999's award-winning Body Politic and 2000's The Bone Yard) who's reluctantly tapped by the Guardians when things get deadly. With the help of his Guardsman sidekick, Davie, and the sufferance of a by-the-book superior, Quint is tasked with finding Fordyce, finding Frankie's murderer, and finally, finding Fordyce's murderer after he, too, succumbs to Ultimate Usquebaugh. In the meantime, Quint juggles the professional-intimate relationship he's having with the city's Senior Guardian, Sophia, the reemergence of his ex-lover, Katharine, and the fact that Katharine, Sophia, and countless others are possible committers of the mounting crimes.Intelligent, breezy, and surely paced, Paul Johnston's wryly humorous mystery succeeds despite its basic whodunit plot. Clever dialogue and likeable (if not wholly fleshed) characters abound, and the near-future setting provides enough diversion and sociopolitical food-for-thought to nicely carry the day. -- Michael Hudson
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Quint Dalrymple #4
Quint Dalrymple 04 - Blood Tree
Paul Johnston
Independent Edinburgh, 2026. The birth-rate is down in the Council’s ‘perfect city’ and gangs of disaffected kids roam the streets. A break-in at the former Scottish Parliament archive is rapidly followed by two gruesome murders, the victims mutilated and covered in blood-drenched branches. Renegade investigator Quintilian Dalrymple’s subsequent enquiries take a new twist when Edinburgh’s brightest teenagers are abducted to the much-feared democratic city-state of Glasgow. What Quint finds there will change his life forever …I
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Quint Dalrymple #5
Quint Dalrymple 05 - House of Dust
Paul Johnston
April, 2028, and independent Edinburgh is facing a mounting crime wave. Experts from the utopian university-state of New Oxford recommend an extreme deterrent – a maximum security prison alongside the central tourist zone. At the prison opening ceremony, the unthinkable happens – an Edinburgh guardian is shot. Having linked New Oxford to the assassination, maverick investigator Quintilian Dalrymple travels there to close the case. Once there, he discovers evidence of a ruthless conspiracy extending to his home city and the only way to stop it is to penetrate New Oxford’s mysterious heart – the place known only as the House of Dust.From Publishers WeeklyIn the Edinburgh, Scotland, of the near future, crime supposedly doesn't exist. But no utopia stays perfect for long, and in Johnston's fifth and final crime novel featuring the grizzled Quint Dalrymple (Water of Death, etc.), the city's leaders are contemplating high-security prisons to house society's troublemakers. Dalrymple, the narrator, is a private investigator in a police state that doesn't welcome him, a blues aficionado in a world that has outlawed music. Caught in a vicious game between the guardians of Edinburgh and the prison consultants of New Oxford, Dalrymple is bullied into service when a guard is shot and a high-ranking official threatened. Johnston makes the well-worn idea of crime in a crime-free world fascinating by wrapping it inside layers of political intrigue and subterfuge. Indeed, this is as much a commentary on modern-day England as it is a stylish mystery. Plot elements like insidious youth gangs, cybernetic implants, stealth assassins and a severed arm in a politician's bathtub at times take a backseat to Johnston's convoluted political preaching, but never for long. While this novel can stand alone, readers familiar with the previous volumes will derive the most enjoyment from Johnston's richly textured brave new world.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review“Hugely entertaining… engagingly imagined.” -- The Times “Intelligent, thought–provoking… an excellent series.” -- Booklist “This series is getting better all the time.” -- Val McDermid “Thrilling, accomplished.” -- Ian Rankin, The Sunday Times
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Quint Dalrymple #8
Impolitic Corpses
Paul Johnston
Quint Dalrymple investigates the strange disappearance of the Lord of the Isles in this gripping dystopian thriller. November, 2038. Scotland has been reunified and Edinburgh's thirty-year experiment with supposedly benevolent totalitarianism is over. But there's still plenty of work for ex-investigator Quint Dalrymple, who's looking into an attempted strangling in Leith. A young man has been attacked by an assailant wearing a bizarre tree-fish costume. Before Quint can make headway, he is asked by the head of government to look into the strange disappearance of the Lord of the Isles. How could Angus Macdonald, leader of the opposition, have vanished from inside his locked bedroom while his valet was sitting outside? And why has a severed finger been hidden in the room? When a body is discovered, arranged in a disturbingly macabre pose, it becomes clear the two cases are linked. As Quint delves further, he is drawn into a complex web of deception whose threads...
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