The Seven Razors of Ockam (1997) by Roger Ormerod

The Seven Razors of Ockam (1997) is a standalone mystery published at the tail-end of Roger Ormerod's quarter-of-a-century run as a writer of varied, original and sadly overlooked crime and detective fiction – retiring after two more novels in 1999. Ormerod greatest contribution to the genre is finding a way to successfully integrate the fairly clued, Golden Age puzzle plots with the post-WWII psychological thrillers, crime novels and the then emerging police procedural. They're not merely traditional detective novels with modern trappings. A variety of personalized tropes makes them distinctly Ormerodian detective novels.

Ormerod's third-to-last novel lost none of the vitality of his work from the 1970s, '80s and early '90s. On the contrary! The Seven Razors of Ockam is one of his most striking and entertaining mysteries to date, but notably different in tone from what came before. Ormerod probably knew his writing career was drawing to a close and decided to have some fun with this one. Ditching the tone and trappings of the crime novel to tell a bonkers, pulp-style mystery thriller that could have been plucked from the pages of James Ronald or Gerald Verner yarn.

The backdrop, really the main "character," of The Seven Razors of Ockam is the fictitious steel manufacturing town of Ockam. Not to be confused with the other Ockam in Surrey. The town, famous for its Ockam Steel, has a long history of steel and arms manufacturing dating back to ancient times, when rival barons would travel to Ockam to have their troops equipped with Ockam weaponry – only "to meet later in order to slaughter each other in distant parts." So "nobody attacked Ockam" and the place developed an independent spirit and populations with "the mercurial sense of fairness and decency that arose from several hundred years of carefully balanced neutrality." That sense of fairness is what helped kick everything off.

Bert "Slasher" Harris, the incumbent mayor of Ockam, is asked to draw the prizes for a raffle held to get the hospital a new dialysis machine. The prize closet is well-stocked with the two top prizes being a Ford Escort and a BMW motorcycle, but also include a typewriter, a Sony Walkman and a new kitchen layout. So an easy enough, routine gig for a mayor, however, Slasher Harris decides to call the winners in reverse order. The first two names drawn think they have won the first and second prize, instead of the sixth and seventh consolation prizes. Pretty soon, the confusion turned into a riot as the crowd was ready to tear their mayor to pieces, wrecking the old Town Hall and burned down the Slasher Harris Stand at Cutters' football field. Graffiti began to appear all over town, mocking the mayor and threatening the prize winners, but of more concern is the theft of one of the town's treasures. A case with a set of seven classic open razors each engraved with a day of the week.

Nearly a month later, on a Monday, the first prize winner is attacked in a parking lot by someone wearing a ski-mask and wielding an open razor. A razor that had Monday engraved on it. However, the assailant is unsuccessful, but Tuesday's victim is not so fortunate ("the attack was savage, sir"). Detective Inspector Tomkins is tasked with putting a stop to this razor wielding maniac apparently slashing through the prizewinners of the raffle.

Like I said, The Seven Razors of Ockam is redolent of the pulp mysteries of yesteryear with killer menacing and thinning out a group of people, but the comparisons only go as far as the setup. After the second attack, Ormerod simply refuses to follow the obvious plot patterns expected from such a pulp-style mystery and goes off-script. So, going into the second-half, the story enters a calm before the storm resumes phase, which admittedly slackens the pace a little. There's not much to tell or describe about this part of the book, except for a curious little anecdote told by the town clerk to the mayor that would have made for an interesting (historical) subplot. In the 1950s, the town had another "one of those crazy murderers on the loose," but "one used a shotgun, though, and he couldn't aim straight to save his life" – targeting the sons of the members of a secretive club. An anecdote that comes with the hushed up solution, however, the motive is quite novel. Just imagine what a writer like Paul Halter would have done with such a story? I think a historically retelling of the 1950s serial killing case intertwined with the present day case would have shored up the whole novel and given the whole story that Ormerodian as shotgun killings was one of his personalized tropes. Something that's notably missing from The Seven Razors of Ockam.

So how does The Seven Razors of Ockam stack up? Ormerod obviously wanted to have fun with this one and therefore lacks the usual plot machinations and complexities of the previous novels. No perfect alibis (Time to Kill, 1974), galore of false solutions (More Dead Than Alive, 1980), locked room slayings (When the Old Man Died, 1991) or delivering a rug-puller of an ending (Face Value, 1983). For example, the murderer becomes more, and more, evident as the story progresses. Even without the wonderful, somewhat surrealistic clue of the tissue paper. While less complicated, densely-plotted than previous novels, Ormerod makes that up by delivering one of his most readable and striking novels. And more humorous in tone than when presenting his detective fiction as serious crime novels or police procedurals. Particular the opening chapters detailing the run-up to the raffle, its immediately aftermath and the Ockamites helped to make The Seven Razors of Ockam a fun, '90s rendition of the pulp-style mystery thrillers from the '30s and '40s.