By the old, abandoned docks on the Mersey River in Liverpool, where first water and now sand has been receding for years, a skeleton is uncovered as A Mersey Killing by Brian L. Porter begins. There’s little to identify it other than a pair of expensive boots and a broken guitar pick, but the surrounding detritus indicates it comes from the mid-1960s.

Detective Sergeant Andy Ross and his female colleague “Izzy” Drake are assigned the case. It’s clearly a murder, as the skeleton shows gunshot wounds to the knees and a crushing blow to the head. But unless they can connect the skeleton to a name soon it will have to be dropped, because they need the resources for more pressing cases.

However, two middle-aged brothers come forward, asking whether the body might be that of their sister, missing since the ‘60s. They don’t know the skeleton has been identified as male. As Inspector Ross listens to their story (more patiently than I imagine would happen in real life in a busy police station), he realizes that another character in the story may just be their dead man. The story is told in two threads, one in the early 1960s, the other “today” (1999). The Sixties thread follows the story of Brendan Kane and the Comets, a rock ‘n roll group riding the wave of the Mersey Sound fad, hoping to achieve stardom like the Beatles. Although they achieve some local success, they never break out. But Brandon and Marie, the sister, a sort of unpaid roadie, fall in love. This is opposed by Marie’s father, a fanatical Irish Catholic who doesn’t want his daughter marrying any bloody Prod. Piece by piece (and with a lot of lucky breaks), the detectives put the true story together, leading to a poignant (if melodramatic and implausible) climax.

A Mersey Killing is another example of an amateurish work that shows some promise in terms of essential storytelling. I was interested to see how it all came out, so I stayed with it in spite of some pretty awful prose.

My main criticism of the writing is something I’ve been seeing a lot of in these days of self-publishing. The text needs cutting, badly. The author doesn’t know how to sharpen his prose, instead just piling words on, hoping one of them will stick. For instance:

Both the inspector and Sergeant Izzie Drake had found themselves being drawn inescapably into the past as they’d sat listening to Ronnie’s story. The man could certainly weave a good tale and had the knack of being able to communicate his thoughts in a way that gave the detectives a fascinating insight not only into the subject they were discussing but into another era, a period in recent history that only those who’d lived through it could perhaps fully appreciate. They were fascinated.

Everything in that passage could be deleted except for the first sentence, and we’d have all the author needs to convey without boring the reader.

Another problem I had with the book was the handling of religious issues. One of the characters is a religious bigot, and certainly not someone I admire. But the author (it seemed to me) wrote from the point of view – common in Europe – that religious faith itself is a kind of aberration that we’ve finally outgrown, thank Freud.

Yet another aspect of the story that troubled me – one you may not agree with me about – is what seemed to me a naïve admiration for the 1960s. The author sees it as a time of innocence and liberation, a wonderful time to live and love. I remember it as a time of drugs, escape from reason, and the first cracks of cultural disintegration.

Still, I finished the thing. You might like it better than I did.