Review: The Twyford Code

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Steven Smith gets out of prison after spending eleven years inside for armed robbery and murder. Determined to go straight after a lifetime working for a London gang he tries to reconnect with his son, a maths professor at Brunel University without success. Dyslexic and practically illiterate, he uses an old iPhone his son gave him to record a sort of diary and also interviews with other people. These audio files have been retrieved and transcribed by a computer which sometimes mistakes Steven's London accent so that the words 'must have' is transcribed as 'mustard'.

Steven's criminal life began forty years earlier, he found an old children's book on a bus and took it with him to school, hoping he could sell it and buy some fish and chips. His Remedial English teacher Miss Iles catches him with the book and reads it aloud to the class. The book's author Edith Twyford was an Enid Blytonesque character, her books were beloved of children but loathed by academics as being elitist, racist, sexist, xenophobic and pretty much every other label you care to mention. One day Miss Iles took the Remedial English class on a school trip to visit Edith Twyford's home, Steven's memories of that day are foggy, what happened to Miss Iles? How did five schoolchildren get home? After that day Steven never returned to school and fell in with the notorious Harrison family.

The reader goes on a journey with Steven, through reading the audio files, to discover what really happened that day with Miss Iles with the help of the four other children who were in his Remedial English class. Along the way he discovers that there is a persistent rumour/urban myth surrounding Edith Twyford and her husband that they were variously: German spies sending coded messages in her books to Nazi Germany; English spies sending coded messages to allies; thieves who stole billions in British gold bullion which was supposed to have been shipped to Canada for safe-keeping during WW2; people trying to stop the theft of the gold bullion.

I don't know how I feel about this book. Part of me feels like I've been Keyser Söze'd (from the film The Usual Suspects) because there are so many stories within stories, stories which turn out not to be true, gotcha moments etc. The trouble with this sort of book/film is that once it ends the (this) reader is left suspecting that if they dissected the book carefully it would all fall apart and/or it was all a waste of time.

It was clever, but not for example in the same way as The Eighth Detective which was twisty and turny and made my head hurt but had a structure to it.

Overall, I enjoyed reading it, but I think I would have preferred the less complicated story.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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