The Blue Place
Nicola Griffith
308 pages
published in 1998
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been as frustrated with the ending to a novel as I am with The Blue Place. I had seen it building up from at least halfway through the story, hoping that its seeming inevitable conclusion would be subverted at the last minute, the same way Nicola Griffith did earlier in the novel, with another plot point that seemed to descent into hardboiled cliché until it didn’t. But the ending wasn’t subverted, was hardboiled cliché, did upset me and yet fitted perfectly with what is an incredibly smart, engaging novel by a writer who has never gone for the easy route in her stories. So what’s going here? To try and find out will take some effort and certainly some spoilers.
Let’s start with Nicola Griffith herself first. Yorkshire born, she moved to Seattle to live with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge. Her first fiction was published in the late eighties, her first novel in 1993. So far she’s written six novels, of which I have now read half. As you may have guessed, The Blue Place is a hardboiled detective novel, her third, the first two being Ammonite and Slow River, both science fiction. she would go on to write two sequels to the The Blue Place, while her latest novel, Hild, is a historical novel about 7th century CE saint Hilda. So far all her novels have had lesbian protagonists and The Blue Place is no exception.