I'm a great fan of the Prime Suspect TV series and Helen Mirren is top of my list of celebrities I would like to invite for dinner. So, when I saw that Lynda la Plante had written a prequel to the original books and it was being turned into a new series called Prime Suspect 1973, I was excited.
We saw the TV series first and it was pretty good. The actress who played the young Tennison was a bit glossy but the scenes of 1970's cops at work were great. They reminded me a lot of Life on Mars which is still one of my all-time favourites.
However, the book, Prime Suspect: Tennison, is another matter. I'm on page 732 of 892 on my iPad and I've struggled through every paragraph. Maybe it's because I already know the ending but you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that, in a crime novel, the baddies will get it in the end. No, I'm sure it's the awful writing.
Critics excuse Ms la Plante's writing style by saying it is "direct", "in your face" and so on. One I read said, "Ms la Plante makes sure you know every detail." ... (whether you like it or not). Her style is turgid, pedestrian and tedious. Her sentence structure has little variety and her dialogue is woeful. No doubt she understands the Cockney idiom but her attempts to write it are childish.
I'm pleased that Ms la Plante has made a successful career as a novelist but I suspect this is more to do with the success of the TV spin-offs than her riveting prose.
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