‘A Granite Silence’ by Nina Allan

Published by Riverrun,
10 April 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-52943-567-3 (HB)

As the old adage asserts, crime fiction is a broad church. It can cover a huge spectrum of types of stories and characters and embraces a variety of approaches ranging from gritty police procedurals to Agatha Christie’s elegantly crafted who-dunnits, from tales of monstrous serial killers to cozy mysteries involving cats.

 A Granite Silence adopts a socio-psychological approach, with its author inserting herself in the story as both witness and investigator and delivering the story in prose that often verges on the poetic. Based on a true story, A Granite Silence examines a notorious crime that occurred in Aberdeen in the spring of 1934: the murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly who lived with her parents on Urquhart Road.

Nina Allan is at pains to describe the context of the crime. At the time, Aberdeen was the largest fishing port in Scotland and the third largest in the UK. Urquhart Road was a community of four-storey Victorian tenements filled with working class people – granite buildings housing families labouring under the twin strains of overcrowding and poverty in conditions that were unhygienic and uncomfortable. Allan introduces us to the eight families occupying Number 61 (two on each floor) – the Priestly’s and their neighbours – and describes the shared lavatories and drying green and the eight coal sheds.  

For Helen and her family, it’s a typical April day. Helen returns from her nearby school at noon for her lunch and, once she’s finished eating, her mother sends her to a bakery down the road for a loaf. As time goes by, Helen’s mother wonders where she might be, worrying her daughter will be late for school. Mrs. Priestly goes out to look for Helen and questions neighbours, but in vain. Finally, the police are summoned, and they organize searches of the vicinity.

Helen’s fate remains a mystery until early the next morning, when her body is discovered in a sack lying on the floor of a communal lobby in the building. A cursory examination indicates she has been strangled and sexually assaulted, and suspicion initially falls on a mysterious man reported lurking in the area. But it transpires he’s the figment of the overheated imagination of a little boy. The plot thickens. It had rained heavily on the night of the child’s disappearance, but the sack in which she is found is dry, indicating it had been placed there by an inhabitant of the building. Curiously, the bruising to the child’s genitals appears to have been inflicted by a wooden instrument.

Allan’s book confirms another adage, that truth is stranger than fiction. One unexpected revelation follows another as the author gradually uncovers what actually befell that ordinary little girl on a spring day in a bustling Scottish port city in the early 1930s. Recommended.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Nina Allan is a novelist and critic. Her first novel The Race won the Grand Prix de L'imaginaire and was a Kitschies finalist. Her second novel The Rift won the British Science Fiction Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle and was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her short fiction has previously been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Fantasy Award. Her most recent novel is The Dollmaker. Born in London, Nina Allan lives and works in the west of Scotland.

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.