Guilty by Definition - Susie Dent ***

By Brian Clegg

Although I mostly avoid books written by celebrities (or even worse books ‘written’ by celebrities) like the plague, there are honourable exceptions – and Susie Dent, best known for handling dictionary corner on (8 out of 10 Cats Does) Countdown deserved such an exception. Inevitably for a lexicographer, words play a big part in her mystery novel. It’s set in the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary (a thinly disguised OED), where a team of editors start to get mysterious letters and postcards.

It’s soon realised that these missives refer to the missing sister of senior editor Martha – most of the book is about unravelling the clues and building up a picture piece-by-piece of what led up to and happened when Martha’s older sister Charlie went missing ten years before.

This is an enjoyably different premise, and Dent does a lot of character building and uncovering of feelings along the way. Perhaps a bit too much in fact. It’s not until we get to around page 300 that things suddenly change up a gear. It was interesting to compare this with the approach of P. D. James in Death in Holy Orders, which I read recently. There are some similarities in introducing a world different to most of our everdays, but though James’s novel is significantly longer, she kept the energy high throughout, while it sometimes felt as if Dent needed to get on with things.

I suspect the lexicography that Dent introduces throughout will either delight or irritate readers depending on their inclinations (though knowing what Dent usually writes and speaks about, perhaps the readership will be self-selecting on the delight side). Oddly, I experienced both reactions. I love etymology, so was delighted by those aspects (for instance the strange appearance of ‘dog’ in the language). But I do find being told obscure words for things that nobody uses, which happens a lot here, a touch tedious.

The other aspect of the book I wasn’t entirely sure about was the cryptic letters that start the whole thing off and feed information to us several times as the plot unfolds. These are extremely cryptic – the sender is asked about why towards the end of the book, but there is no good reason for it. The aim is to get Martha and her colleagues to uncover why and how Charlie disappeared, and there really is no logic to doing this by sending near-impenetrable, clever clever letters which the team have to painstakingly interpret, rather than simply telling them what they need to know.

There is one other oddity here. The lexicographers usually make fast work of uncovering what is meant in these long, flowery letters, but the mechanisms that conceal the message are very arbitrary – there would be many other ways to hide the desired words in the same text, and the solutions they come up with seem unlikely to be deduced. Worse still, the ‘real’ message is itself in the form of a short cryptic clue. One of these has them baffled for nearly a whole day (requiring them to identify a psalm from a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference) – but it’s absolutely trivial compared with cracking the letter itself. I spotted what was meant in seconds, and so would the lexicographers, without a laboured inspiration from the way a message was once hidden in a poem. To make things even worse, the solution depended on using a specific translation of the psalm – the modern translation wouldn’t work, but this is never mentioned.

I’m glad I read this book – it was fun and different and would appeal to anyone who loves language. But I wish it had more energy.

You can buy Guilty by Definition from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.