Peter May: Lockdown (Quercus Publishing 2020)
Lockdown is an unusual entrant to Encyclopaedia Pandemica; not apocalyptic as such but a detective thriller. Scottish crime writer Peter May wrote this is 2005, but it was considered too far fetched for publication.
What May’s publishers found too unbelievable in 2005 is the novel’s setting – London in lockdown during an epidemic. The pathogen in question is H5N1 Avian ‘Flu which has acquired the ability to be transmitted between humans. The UK’s Swine ‘Flu outbreak (H1N1) outbreak in 2009 was not enough; It took the global Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to trigger finally Lockdown’s publication in April 2020. In this pandemically-paced policier with sharp turns worthy of any decent car-chase, the action follows DI Jack MacNeil, a Scottish detective in London, as he investigates the murder of a young Asian girl.
For those of us currently emerging from the first phase of Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, there is plenty here that is familiar. The human remains that trigger the investigation are discovered on a site where a temporary hospital is being built. This is a London where the streets are empty, the schools are closed, workers have been laid off and the Prime Minister has caught the virus (although in the novel he dies). Masks are routinely worn by everyone and there is mention of social distancing – though not enforced to the extent we are currently used to. There is talk of Government statistics being “crap”, and MacNeil refusing to go to a hospital because “you never know what you might catch”. May’s well imagined lockdown goes much further than ours in that martial law has been imposed, with curfew enforced by the army adding a suitably grim backdrop to a murder enquiry.
Trying to avoid spoilers, there is also a central theme involving a pharmaceutical company which will please Coronavirus conspiracy theorists. Its unravelling and final revelation is more important to the plot than simply finding out “whodunnit”. The climax of the novel aboard the London Eye brings to mind the ferris wheel scene towards the end of The Third Man, the 1949 film featuring Orson Welles as Harry Lime, particularly given Lime's own involvement with pharmaceuticals. Tense and gripping, this would make a great movie.