TT 334: From "The Usual Santas"
The first page of a Mick Herron short story
Around this time last year I went to the Mysterious Bookshop and made Mick Herron take a selfie with me.
The Herron renaissance continues. The TV show is beloved and the newest book is getting great reviews; read Vince Keenan for more.
Dolphin Junction collects various short stories. They are all excellent crime tales and often feature a twist, a throwback to the days when Roald Dahl or Stanley Ellin produced miniature masterpieces for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. (A poster of EQMM can be seen above Herron’s head in the above photo.)
Herron is heavy on description. For example, each Slough House book begins with a long look at Jackson Lamb’s decrepit office building. Many thriller writers try to be literary like this, and often I skip over those pages. However, at the moment I’m re-reading the Slough House series to make sure I don’t miss a single metaphor.
The short story “The Usual Santas” opens with Herron taking his scalpel to the modern-day shopping center. A worthy excerpt for the holiday mood!
Whiteoaks, the brochures explained, was more than a shopping center: it was a Day Out For The Whole Family; a Complete Retail Experience Under Just One Roof. It was an Ideally Situated Outlet Village—an Ultra-Convenient Complex For The Ultra-Modern Consumer. It was where Quality met Design to form an Affordable Union. It might have been a Stately Pleasure Dome. It was possibly a Garden Of Earthly Delight. It was almost certainly where Capital Letters went to Die.
More precisely, it was on the outskirts of one of London’s northwest satellite towns, and, viewed from above, resembled a glass and steel rendering of a giant octopus dropped headfirst onto the landscape. In the gaps between its outstretched tentacles were parks and play areas and public conveniences, and at each of its two main entrances were garages offering, in addition to the usual services, full valet coverage, 4-wheel alignment and diagnostic analysis, as well as free air and a Last-Minute One-Stop-Shop. Cart stations—colored pennants hoisted above them for swift location—were positioned at those intervals market research had determined user-friendly, and were assiduously tended by liveried cart-jockeys. From ten minutes before dusk until ten after daybreak the area was bathed in gentle orange light, the quiet humming of CCTV cameras a constant reminder that your security was Whiteoaks’ concern. And in a hedged-off corner between the center’s electricity substation and one of four home-delivery loading bays—perhaps the only point in the complex to which the word “accessible” did not apply—lurked a furtive row of recycling bins, like a consumerist memento mori.
As for the interior, it was a contemporary cathedral, sacred to the pursuit of retail opportunity. There was a food mall, a clothing avenue, an entertainment hall; there were wings dedicated to white goods (“all your domestic requirements satisfied!”), pampering (“full body tan in minutes!”) and financial services (“consolidate your debts—ask us how!”). There was a boulevard of sporting goods, a bridleway of gardening supplies; a veritable Hatton Garden of jewelers. No franchise ever heard of went unrepresented, and several never before encountered had multiple outlets. Whiteoaks’ delicatessens carried sweetmeats from as near as Abbotsbury and as far as Zywocice; its bookshops shelved volumes by every author its readers could imagine, from Bill Bryson to Jeremy Clarkson. The shopper who is tired of Whiteoaks, it might easily be asserted, is a shopper who is tired of credit. During the summer, light washed down from the recessed contours of its cantilevered ceilings, and during the winter it did exactly the same. Temperature, too, was regulated and constant, and in this it matched everything else. At Whiteoaks, you could buy raspberries in winter and tinsel in July. Seasonal variation was discouraged as an unnecessary brake on impulse purchasing.
Which was not to say that Whiteoaks ignored the passage of the year; rather, it measured the months in a manner appropriate to its customers’ needs. As surely as Father’s Day follows Mother’s, as unalterably as Harry Potter gives way to the Great Pumpkin, time marches on; its inevitable progress registering as peaks and troughs in a never-ending flow chart.
For there are only seventeen Major Feasts in the calendar of the Complete Retail Experience.
And the greatest of these is Christmas.