The Finding Machine
A review of The Finding Machine by Lucy Lyons – 240902
Lucy Lyons is a Mytchett-based writer and The Finding Machine, published in 2023, is her debut novel. The golden age of the murder mystery and detective fiction is generally acknowledged to have been the inter war period and as a reader I am voraciously working through as much from that era s I can lay my hands on. Sometimes, though, it is instructive to take a look at what modern practitioners are doing with a genre that is more than a little hackneyed. Lyons’ masterstroke is to blend her mystery with elements culled from science fiction, an unusual marriage but one, at least in this instance, which seems to work.
She pays homage to the Golden Age by setting her mystery, the disappearance of a young girl, in the 1920s, and while the investigations are more contemporary, they steadfastly cling on to the 20th century by being based in 1998. For those of use who are long in the tooth the late 90s was the dawn of the new technological age with emails, the internet and even the ability, if you had the patience to wait for the connection and the painful build up of the screen, to surf the internet. Lyons brings all of this vividly to the page as well as all the then familiar but now almost forgotten paraphernalia and products of 90s life. It is a wonderful canter down memory lane.
The eponymous Finding Machine is sent to the narrator, Alex Martin, by her mother in Ireland, the last vestige of her father’s electronic tinkerings, amongst other things he had made the family a television set future-proofed to receive five channels. She gets it working by inserting a photograph of her father, although it cannot cope with group photos, and is rewarded with a string of numbers shown on the display panel which turn out to be co-ordinates. It is a machine that uses a form of what we now know as Global Positioning System.
Alex proves the machine’s worth by using it to identify the location of her father’s grave, the whereabouts of a cow, and then turns it to some profitable use as the means to find and recover lost pets. However, the real nub of the book is the search to discover the backstory of a little girl in a family photograph who seems to have disappeared without trace and been erased from the family’s collective memory. Aided by her housemate, Antony, an escapee from Hackney and an IT specialist, she deploys her father’s machine to go back in time and seek some answers to what is a dark secret and one which threatens to damage relationships.
Rather like the valves on an old-fashioned television, the book takes its time to warm up but Lyons deploys the early chapters to good effect, allowing the reader to get a better understanding of Alex, an independent but uncertain woman, and her life and relationships. The plot is a little thin and the resolution is a tad disappointing but in Alex Lyons has created a warm companion with whom the reader, or at least this reader, is delighted to spend time with.
Lyons writes with verve and no little humour, her text full of acute observations and the result of painstaking research. Bringing detective fiction together with science fiction so successfully is a neat achievement, marking out Lyons as a writer to watch out for.
