Barry Maitland

• Born: Unknown
• Place of Birth: Paisley, Scotland

TYPE OF PLOT: Police procedural

PRINCIPAL SERIES: David Brock and Kathy Kolla, 1994-2021; Harry Belltree, 2014-2016

Contribution

Barry Maitland began publishing only after a successful career as an architect and academic in both England and Australia. Even in his earliest novels, he displays a mature insight into character and motivation that is rare in crime fiction. His background has also enabled him to incorporate into his fiction a breadth of learning in several fields, especially art, architecture, and urban history. Although Maitland’s novels have been commercially successful and critically well-received, they have not yet achieved the reputation they merit. Like the works of the British expert of the police procedural, P. D. James, Maitland’s novels are intricately plotted, thematically sophisticated, and symbolically suggestive.

Maitland’s chief contribution to the police procedural is his imaginative and often symbolic depiction of crime settings. All of his fiction is set within London or its suburban environs. Having spent many years growing up in the city, Maitland is intimately aware of its many layers of history but also acutely aware of the changes that successive waves of immigration and social change have brought. This awareness is deftly woven into the fabric of all his novels.

Biography

Barry Maitland was born in Paisley, Scotland, and raised in London. He studied architecture at Cambridge University, graduating in 1966. He worked as an architect in the United Kingdom for several years before attending the University of Sheffield, where he earned a doctorate in urban design. In 1984, he accepted a position as dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, where he remained until 2000. He became a full-time writer and settled in the Hunter Valley region of southeastern Australia, two hours north of Sydney.

Maitland’s first novel, The Marx Sisters (1994), was shortlisted for the John Creasey New Blood Dagger award by the British Crime Writers’ Association. The Marx Sisters, which was translated into several languages, also established the series characters David Brock and Kathy Kolla, who would become the mainstays of Maitland’s subsequent crime fiction. Maitland’s second novel, The Malcontenta (1995), was awarded the New Kelly Award for best crime-fiction novel by an Australian author.

Before his 1994 debut, Maitland had already published several academic works on architecture and design. One of these, Shopping Malls: Planning and Design (1985), is a study of how shopping malls evolved architecturally out of more traditional urban retail spaces and how they might become more amenable to a broader range of human social uses.

Analysis

As a writer of police procedurals, Barry Maitland is no iconoclast. He works within the classical limitations of the genre. David Brock and Kathy Kolla are both brilliant but fallible and, thus, are realistic practitioners of police detection. Maitland’s realism is also evident in his depiction of how the modern police detective is dependent on teams of forensic, medical, ballistics, and computer specialists. The methodical and painstaking gathering of evidence is always given its due in these novels, yet Maitland never allows his stories to become bogged down in scientific or technical detail.

In the police procedural’s most commonly employed plot structure, a murder is committed in an early chapter, investigators are called to the crime scene, and the ensuing investigation leading to a solution constitutes the whole of the story’s plot. Thus far in his career, Maitland has relied exclusively on this classic structure. Its chief advantage is that, at each step of the way, the readers know no more than the investigators and must piece together the evidence, sort through the clues, and eliminate false trails without prior knowledge of the relationships between victims and perpetrators. Although Maitland’s plots are not innovative in this respect, they are nonetheless distinguished by their multilayered intricacy. For example, in All My Enemies (1996), Brock’s team investigates a murder that appears to be tied to several previously unsolved killings of young women. Although the main line of investigation focuses on a middle-aged amateur photographer who is believed to be stalking his victims on the London subways, Kolla pursues a much less promising trail that leads to her involvement in a London theater company. What begins as a subplot ends by absorbing the primary plot in a final, elegant, and shocking solution.

One of the weaknesses of crime fiction as a genre, and especially of the police procedural, is that it traditionally allows little room for the development of character, which is generally dominated by the exigencies of the plot. Maitland addresses this weakness in a manner typical of modern police procedurals. He allows conflict to develop between his detectives’ personal lives and their police careers. Given the psychological demands of the crime investigator’s job, the long hours, and the brutal realm in which they must operate, it is almost inevitable that familial or romantic relationships will be challenging to maintain. Maitland is adept at weaving such conflicts into his novels, especially in exploring Kolla’s troubled family history and her repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to establish stable relationships. However, Maitland is also aware that the development of his detectives as fully three-dimensional characters must remain subordinate to the demands of the plot. Unlike many other modern crime fiction writers, he does not allow the personal conflicts of his detectives to lapse into melodrama or deflate the suspense that a satisfying work of crime fiction demands. As for Maitland’s perpetrators and suspects, they are rarely mere psychological “types” but complex and realistically motivated characters.

Maitland’s greatest strength, however, is his ability consistently to place his characters in settings of striking originality. This feature of Maitland’s writing is already evident in the first novel, The Marx Sisters, in which an all but forgotten street in the heart of London, virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century, is threatened by modern development. Equally impressive in this regard are several of the later novels, including Silvermeadow (2000), in which a glittering new suburban shopping mall becomes not only a setting for murder but also a symbolic device for reflection on the alienated social conditions of modern consumerism; The Verge Practice (2003), in which the ultramodern corporate headquarters of an architectural firm becomes symbolically resonant of its founder’s egomania; and No Trace (2004), in which an urban colony of postmodern artists becomes a staging ground for murder masquerading as performance art. Maitland continues to work on his Brock and Kolla novels, publishing Spider Trap (2006), Dark Mirror (2009), Chelsea Mansions (2011), The Raven's Eye (2013), The Promised Land (2019), and The Russian Wife (2021). Several novels were shortlisted for Best Novel in the Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing. In 2016, Maitland also completed his Harry Belltree trilogy, which included the novels Crucifixion Creek: The Belltree Trilogy, Book One (2014), Ash Island (2015), and Slaughter Park (2016).

Silvermeadow

In Silvermeadow, after the crushed and shrink-wrapped body of a teenage girl is found in a trash compactor at an industrial waste disposal site, investigators have reason to believe that the girl was killed at a nearby shopping mall called Silvermeadow. After Brock and Kolla become involved, the investigation is temporarily headquartered at Silvermeadow during the height of the Christmas shopping season. Initially, the investigation centers on two suspects who work within the mall because Brock is convinced that the mall’s ultramodern security arrangements would have rendered murder or abduction by an outsider nearly impossible. The investigation is further complicated by the suspicion that at least one other girl’s death is connected to the mall.

Although the plotting and characterization in Silvermeadow are superbly crafted, the real center of attention is the mall itself. Built on the site of an ancient Anglo-Saxon battle against the Vikings, Silvermeadow is no ordinary mall but a megamall consisting of nearly three hundred retail outlets, cinemas, a fitness center, and a leisure pool—all spread over a million square feet of climate-controlled space. Among the many entertainments on the mall’s grand concourse is an enormous, scaled model of a volcano that erupts on the hour, complete with realistic lava flows. The mall is a gigantic consumption machine designed to maximize profits by creating an all-encompassing fantasy of comfort and security for the consumer. However, Brock’s murder investigation must, of necessity, strip away this illusion and peer behind the facade of security and manufactured Christmas cheer.

The central thematic irony in Silvermeadow turns on this discrepancy between the mall’s carefree and reassuring appearance and the frightening reality that lurks beneath. As the investigation probes deeper into the mall’s history and politics, it becomes an increasingly sinister place. Just as the mall preys parasitically on its unwary customers (and the local communities whose economies it has disrupted), so also a murderer is preying on the flocks of teenage girls for whom the mall is a home away from home. Maitland suggests that the mall stands symbolically for the larger society in which the modern individual, reduced to a passive consumer, is all too easily manipulated by the illusions of advertising and the false promises of comfort, satisfaction, and security. The essential message of the mall is that you, the consumer, may have all that you desire. What is most disturbing about Silvermeadow is that among the mall’s thousands of shoppers, a murderer, too, has heard the same message.

In Silvermeadow, Maitland has drawn heavily on his own architectural expertise in the planning, building, and managing of malls. However, none of this technical knowledge is on display merely to impress the reader with the author’s learning; all of it is central to the investigation and is revealed in a way that avoids disrupting the narrative with long digressions.

The Verge Practice

In The Verge Practice (2003), when Brock and Kolla are sent to investigate the murder of the wife of a famous British architect, Charles Verge, the evidence strongly suggests that Verge himself is the killer. However, Verge has mysteriously disappeared, and Brock’s Scotland Yard superiors would, for political reasons, prefer to see the great architect exonerated. When Sandy Clarke, Verge’s business partner, commits suicide and leaves behind a signed “confession” to the murder of Verge’s wife, Brock, against his better instincts, is forced to close the investigation. Meanwhile, Kolla undertakes an unofficial line of inquiry that leads her to Barcelona, Spain, where, she suspects, a sinister plastic surgeon may have altered Verge’s appearance and aided him in fleeing to South America. Although this proves, in part, to be a false trail, Kolla does uncover a revealing videotape that points toward the eventual solution to the murder.

The Verge Practice has been described as Maitland’s “architectural novel” with good reason. Many of the novel’s most important scenes are placed in architecturally rich settings in England and Spain. Three of Verge’s most famous buildings are featured: an award-winning house built early in his career, the Verge Practice corporate headquarters in London, and a recently completed, state-of-the-art, maximum-security prison. All three buildings are striking examples of the ultramodern minimalism that has won Verge an international reputation. The novel extensively reflects the history of modern architecture but never in a merely didactic fashion. Instead, Maitland seems most interested in exploring the underlying psychological connections between Verge's cold and controlling personality and the minimalist austerity of the buildings he designs. Although the point is never overtly thrust on the reader, it is clear that Maitland is disturbed by the inhumane emphasis on function over form in these buildings—a trend in modern architecture dating back to the revolutionary work of German architect Mies van der Rohe, whose aesthetics are the model for Verge’s own work.

No Trace

In No Trace (2004), two little girls have gone missing and are feared to be the victims of a serial child rapist and killer when Brock and Kolla are called to the scene of a third abduction, Northcote Square, a purely fictional neighborhood and art colony in east London. Six-year-old Tracey Rudd has disappeared from her home, and the police have reason to believe that she was taken from her ground-floor bedroom in the wee hours of the morning while her father, the famous conceptual artist Gabriel Rudd, slept in another part of the house. Rudd, a widower, is one of several suspects in the case.

Just as Maitland uses a shopping mall setting in Silvermeadow to comment indirectly on the social alienation reflected in mall culture, in No Trace, Maitland employs an urban community of artists to comment on the morally repellant spectacle of postmodern art, which is here presented as essentially parasitical on the more authentic art of the past. Northcote Square is an old London neighborhood that has been recently colonized by several artists, some traditional, but most of them self-consciously postmodern, which is to say that their “art” consists largely of what is known as pastiche, that is, borrowings (sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not) from previous artistic styles and techniques.

Maitland’s novel takes its title from the Rudd exhibition, “No Trace,” mounted in the Pie Factory, a gallery run by Rudd’s tireless promoter and art impresario, Fergus Tait. The exhibition consists of a series of banners, each depicting cryptically a day in the course of the investigation of the abduction of Rudd’s daughter. Although Maitland is careful to include various points of view regarding the value of the artworks depicted here, there is nonetheless a strong undercurrent of satire suggesting that much of the postmodern art world is not really about art in the traditional sense but about the exploitation of a gullible public by cunning, self-promoting artists, their agents and promoters, and a media establishment all too willing to heap publicity on the latest outrageous artistic “statement.”

In certain respects, No Trace resembles the American novelist Carol O’Connell’s Killing Critics (1997), a brilliant police procedural in which the New York art community is similarly satirized. However, in Maitland’s novel, the satire is subtler and more effectively subordinated to the demands of the plot. The plot’s final solution largely turns on Kolla’s ability to decipher Rudd’s artistic borrowings from an obscure eighteenth-century painter, Henry Fuseli, particularly the image of a mysterious dark figure leading a small child by the hand into a dark tunnel.

Principal Series Characters:

• David Brock, head of Scotland’s Yard’s Serious Crimes Branch, is a large, bearded, and aging detective, legendary among the Metropolitan Police of London for his ability to solve baffling murders. Little is revealed about his past, except that he has been divorced for a long time and has a son in America whom he has not seen in years. He is sophisticated, articulate, cultured, an effective leader, and highly sensitive to the psychological needs of his subordinates. He has repeatedly refused promotion, disdaining administrative work.
• Kathy Kolla is the rising star on Brock’s Serious Crimes team. She is a young, single, brilliantly intuitive, and ambitious detective sergeant. Embittered by memories of her father’s suicide, she is obsessive about her work. Although there is little conflict between her and Brock, she often strikes out on her own initiative, a trait that gets results but also frequently places her life in peril.
• Harry Belltree is a Sydney-based homicide detective. He is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan and the son of the first Aboriginal judge of the Supreme Court.

Bibliography

“About the Author – Barry Maitland.” Barry Maitland, www.barrymaitland.com/on-life-and-writing/biography. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Bevan, Scott. “Reading Between the Lines of Crime Author Barry Maitland.” Newcastle Herald, 18 Jan. 2018, www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/5171922/finding-the-plot. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Binyon, T. J. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Cannon, Peter. Review of Silvermeadow, by Barry Maitland. Publishers Weekly, vol. 249, no. 30, 29 July 2002, p. 57.

Publishers Weekly. Review of No Trace, by Barry Maitland. vol. 253, no. 29, 24 July 2006, p. 39.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History. 3d ed., New York: Mysterious Press, 1993.

Underhill, Paco. The Call of the Mall. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.