So, I’ve moved on to the next of the Vinyl Detective novels after Flip Back with Low Action, which once again has kept with the trend started with that book of moving between music scenes, after exhausting types of records (more or less – the Detective hasn’t gone after a Picture Disk yet). This time covering the ’70s Punk scene.

The focus here is on a fictional all-women punk group called the “Blue Tits”, which had a few successful records, and whose members (with a few exceptions) all ended up financially well off – helped by the fact that they were themselves all financially well off and were attending a posh girls school, which is where they got their name (the Blue Tits were one of the schools’ avian themed houses).

Unlike the problems I had with Flip Back, Low Action does give a bit of a glimpse of the ’70s punk scene, through bands getting the word out of upcoming albums through fanzines, some of the focused anti-intellectualism of the scene at the time (at least in the UK -“the drummer needs to keep time, but put the person who can’t play their respective instruments on those instruments on purpose because if we demonstrate competence then we’re not punk,” along with hiding the fact that that they were actually paying attention in Latin class), and record labels popping up – often attached to record stores. Cartmel even gives the Blue Tits their own version of the Sex Pistols’ infamous interview with Bill Grundy – with the exact same repercussions for the incident (though the Tits use harsher language than the Pistols and Siouxie Sioux used on Grundy’s show).

Low Action still stumbles some when it comes to the exploration of the scene beyond that – there isn’t much talk about what it was like to be a woman in the larger Punk scene at the time (something that has been explored in documentary filmmaking and non-fiction works about the Riot Grrl movement in the US, but I haven’t seen or heard about that much exploration of the UK side of things).

Additionally, the book shows a bit of a trend over the last few works where the climax involves the antagonist when faced with being revealed by The Detective, and with it arrest and conviction, kills themselves (or attempts to kill themselves) and leaves a suicide note in some form or another to explain things to the Detective and company. The antagonist is thwarted in their suicide attempt in this book, but it still feels like Cartmel is falling into a bit of a rut when figuring out how to end the novels in this series. He doesn’t want to deal with the characters having to go through the time-consuming mess of resolving this through the criminal justice system (and the public visibility that would come with it for The Detective, Tinkler, Clean Head, and Nevada).

Speaking of which, Tinkler felt like he was becoming a bit of a parody of himself in this book. If he’s not being horny on main, he’s being almost a caricature of a stoner. It made the scenes where he’s with the Detective and Nevada tedious.

That said, there’s a lot I did like with this book – this is a very tense mystery, which did leave me guessing in a lot of respects up to the end, but also, when the antagonist was revealed, the explanation for who they were made total sense, and the same for what their motive was.

In short, to use the gymnastic metaphor that gets brought up a lot in full – Low Action‘s routine nails the fundamentals, and even gets some of the big flashy stuff. But there’s a lot of moments where the book just almost slips for things that it’s shown it can do before, though it recovers each time, and it’s got a hop at the end, but it otherwise made the landing successfully.

Low Action is available from Amazon, Kobo, Alibris, and Bookshop.org – buying anything through those links supports the site (and through Bookshop supports independent bookstores, so that’s cool)

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