R J Ellory - Quiet Belief in Angels

Review by Linda Wornes on the bookshow 20th November 2008
A Quiet Belief in Angels’ by R J Ellory was one of 10 books shortlisted for the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year, one of the categories in the Galaxy Book Awards earlier this summer, the winner being A ‘Thousand Splendid Suns’. Set in the late 1930s in a close-knit community in Georgia, USA, it is the dark and disturbing story of a succession of young girls who are found brutally murdered close to their own homes.

Joseph Vaughn is 12 when the first murder is committed. He is profoundly affected as Alice had been in his class and his memory of her was of a sweet-tempered, cheerful child. Almost 3 years later, and after the 4th murder, Joseph is frustrated by the lack of progress made by the Federal Bureau and the local sheriff and feels compelled to protect other children from a similar fate. He and a group of school friends form The Guardians but they are unable to prevent the murder of the fifth child. Because the Guardians had failed and because Joseph had found the girl, in some way he felt responsible for what had happened.

At school, Joseph’s young teacher Alexandra Webber encourages him to write and the process is cathartic – not only because his thoughts are never far from the murdered girls but because he watches his mother’s mental health deteriorate in hospital. In later years his writing is once again a lifeline when the macabre events almost overtake him.

This is the first novel I have read by this author. It doesn’t fit into any particular genre. It’s a crime thriller in the sense that the identity of the killer is not revealed until the end but the focus of the story is on the effect the crimes have on the local community and its individual inhabitants rather than on the killer himself.

Ellory’s characterisation is brilliant and his sense of time and place whether in Georgia during the second World War or in New York in the late 40s transports you from a provincial farming community to the brash, cheek-by-jowl city of Brooklyn. ‘Its streets like veins, boulevards like arteries, its avenues like snapping electric synapses, channelling, reaching; a million voices, a million more laid over them, everyone close up together like family but seeing nothing but themselves.’ As I was reading I was convinced Ellory is American and before recommending this book to a friend in America I checked out his website. R J Ellory is in fact English. He was born in Birmingham and still lives there.
When he first tried to get his work published in the early 1990s he received many polite and complimentary rejection letters from publishers. The standard response from the UK publishing trade was that they would not consider the possibility of publishing books based in the US written by an Englishman. He was advised to send his work to an American publisher which he duly did and received from them equally polite and complimentary rejection letters that said it was not possible for American publishers to publish books set in the US written by an Englishman! Ellory stopped writing out of sheer frustration and did not start again for several years.

Fortunately by that time attitudes had changed. He now has 5 books to his credit, one is due out soon, another next year and he is currently working on yet another.
Finally, one further snippet of information about this author. His earlier books were published under his full name of Roger Jon Ellory but later this was changed to RJ Ellory. Although with tongue in cheek he has always said it saves on ink, the real reason was because his agents believed it would sell more books. Whether it worked or not he is not sure but he feels privileged to be in the august company of such ‘abbreviated’ writers like JK Rowling, HG Wells, AA Milne and JRR Tolkein!