Snuff

"Most people will have heard of Discworld . There are 41 books in the series. Pratchett was an amazing and prolific writer, and he got good in public. I don’t mean that snarkily. There was a time in publishing when a writer who had a middling couple of books—which were promising and good but not great—could attract an audience and build that audience, even with relatively low sales figures, and continue to be featured in bookshops and so on. That time ended not long after Pratchett began his career, with the so-called death of the midlist. You saw a massive contraction of the number of titles being carried because of a massive consolidation in the number of stores where those books were carried. You had both consolidation in the trade, which is booksellers like Waterstones (and Borders, in the old days), and consolidation in the mass market, which is chemists, grocers, train stations, and so on. That consolidation saw a much more high-stakes environment, where a writer who had been historically successful and had a bad outing, but even more so, writers who were at the start of their career and had a bad second book (say) found themselves unable to be carried by anyone else. Either that’s where their careers ended, or they took on pen names and restarted their careers. Pratchett is an example of what we lost with that because Pratchett’s early novels, including his early Discworld novels, are merely okay, and his later novels are great. Snuff is one of those great ones, and it stands alone quite well. It is a cozy murder mystery set in a stately manor in the equivalent of the English countryside—a place called The Shire, in which the local magistrates are the great and the good, and in which they are all complicit in a murder. That murder is of a person who is considered subhuman, and therefore the murder is—by the lights of the town and the local system of justice—not a murder at all. At worst, it’s poaching. Someone’s taken a game animal, rather than murdered a person. “The gamekeepers are all poachers” The hero of this book is Sam Vimes. He’s one of the most important heroes of the Pratchett canon. He’s a cop and he’s on vacation. A delightful trope of the police procedural is the cop on vacation who stumbles upon a murder, and this novel has some of the best little tasty elements of that. His loving and quite well-drawn wife, Sybil, has told him he’s overworked and has conspired with his colleagues and his boss (who’s effectively the dictator of the city for which he is chief of police) to force him to go on vacation. Of course, Vimes immediately literally stumbles upon a murder. The character I want to highlight here is a bit of a recurring character in Pratchett. He is a forensic accountant-turned-copper, AE Pessimal. In an earlier Sam Vimes book, Pessimal is set against Sam Vimes as his overseer, to find out about the out-of-control spending in the police force. He shows up as a pecksniff, second-guessing all of the expenditure the police force is making, and doing this very difficult job. Out of desperation, and maybe sadism, Sam Vimes sticks a truncheon in Pessimal’s hand and says, ‘You’re coming down on the line with us.’ Pessimal turns out to be someone who likes being out there. He’s got the affect of the rabbit and the spirit of the wolf, and he goes after the miscreants. But what he really specializes in is going over their finances. Repeatedly, there are Sam Vimes adventures in which he does combat against the great and the good, the elites of Pratchett’s milieu, and the coup de grâce is delivered by an accountant who goes over their books. And this, I think, is one of the best of those (another one that’s quite notable is Making Money ). In Snuff , Pessimal turns up as they are cleaning house with these corrupt local magistrates, who are also the great landowners of the territory, and figures out how they’ve also all been involved in smuggling and tax cheating and so on. That is what actually breaks the back of the conspiracy , in a way that merely holding them to account for a murder wouldn’t have done. It can be seen as a variation of the noir formula in which the unlicensed cop thinks the cops can’t do things and then discovers that the cops won’t do things. In this case, Pessimal is coming in as an unlicensed tax inspector and doing something that I think we all can relate to in an era in which the Prime Minister is married to a non-domiciled billionaire who doesn’t pay tax: He’s turning up and taking people who, by dint of privilege and power, are spared the universal of death and taxes that everyone else is subject to, and he’s bringing them to justice. He is a beautifully drawn character, and the comeuppance is so sweet that it makes for a wonderful denouement to an absolutely stellar book."