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I love Magnus Mills and have been reading him for years, and have a few on the shelves that I thought would be likely to come up in my May reading. The Forensic Records Society (2017) was a gift last year from my friend Mel, who also introduced me to Mills’ writing in the first place.

The narrator (I think unnamed, though all the men’s names in this book are so bland as to be deliberately forgettable) is chatting one night with his friend James. They are listening to a record that they enjoy but is no longer in the limelight, and decide that probably nobody else in the world is listening to it – one thing leads to another, and they come to a decision about bringing together record-lovers. Or, at least, James has the idea:

“We could form a society for the express purpose of listening to records closely and in detail, forensically if you like, without any interruption or distraction. There would be regular gatherings, and membership would depend on some kind of test to make sure people are genuinely interested.”

“You mean a code of conduct?”

“Certainly,” said James. “We don’t want any charlatans.”

They decide to hold the inaugural meeting in the backroom of the pub. Landlord George, affable and largely unquestioning, is happy for them to hold it there rent-free for a trial period. The only rules of the Forensic Records Society are to turn up on time, bring three records (not LPs) and then listen to them in turn, without comment or judgement.

The group is small at first – and one man, in a long leather coat, is turned away because he arrives a few minutes late. James is firm on that front. The others listen to their records, not making comments or judgements, though one of the men (Chris) often quotes one of the lines from a song that seems to summarise it. Another (Mike) is fixated upon how long each record is, and considers three minutes the perfect length – almost as though it were a holy grail. Curiously, when they leave the room, more time has passed than the number of records played would allow for.

There are a few things that threaten this small group of like-minded men. One is James’s insistence on rules – and using the narrator as a lackey to enforce them, including shutting out the barmaid one evening. The other is the rival groups that start up.

The first is formed by that rejected man in the leather coat – a Confessional Records Society, where people go one at a time to play a record and make a confession. Most seem to leave in tears of joy, though the Forensic Records Society’s attempts to infiltrate don’t go to plan. But that’s not the final rival group that emerges in this ordinary pub, much to the delight of landlord George with his eye on the profit margin.

Along the way, Mills incorporates many names of records – most of which I hadn’t heard of, though there is a playlist you can use alongside. The first edition of The Forensic Records Society (pictured above) even came in the shape of a record, though my paperback is a little more plebian. The text suggests that there is a wide range of styles, artists, and eras featured, though looking through the playlist it definitely leans towards the taste of middle-aged men – which certainly fits the characters.

As so often with Mills, there is a lurking sense of menace throughout. He is so careful never to overstate anything, and it’s the reader who brings all that foreboding to the novel. It’s just about a bunch of blokes listening to records – on the surface. But you can’t help think that it’s about something else.

There are always analogies and parallels floating about when you’re reading Mills – is it all about the October Revolution, as one reviewer suggests? Or is it about religious schisms? Or cults? Mills is too clever to ever let you pin anything down. He is a master of short, sharp dialogue that doesn’t say much. But he simply invests the everyday with an uneasiness that makes each of his novels feel quite powerfully dark – unsettling in the best possible way.

It’s always a discomforting pleasure to spend time with Mills, and there is nobody like him.

I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. Entirely from tin.

My house has no windows because there’s nothing to see. Oh, there are shutters that can be used to let the light in when required, but they remain closed against the weather for most of the time. It stands in a wild place, my house, high up on the plain. At night it creaks and groans as the wind batters it for hour after hour, in search of a gap to get inside. Even the door has to be bolted top and bottom to stop it from being blown open. I used to worry in case one day I might lose the roof, but so far that hasn’t happened and now I’m certain the structure is quite sound. The man who built it made sure of that. I found the house empty a few years ago, and adopted it for my own use. At first sight I knew it had everything I could need: somewhere to eat and drink and sleep without disturbance, protected from the elements by a layer of corrugated metal and nothing more. A very modest dwelling I must say, but it looked clean and tidy so I moved in. For a long while I was quite content here, and remained convinced I would find no better place to be. Then one day a woman arrived at my door and said, ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

This is the opening to Magnus Mills’s strange, brilliant Three To See The King from 2001. It’s the sixth of his books I’ve read, though the third to be published, and there are certainly hallmarks that I recognise. A short narrative, told in a sparse way from a first-person narrator who doesn’t entirely know what’s happening to him. And the reader certainly doesn’t know either.

The anonymous ‘I’ lives in this tin house in a seemingly endless desert. He has a neighbour, Simon Painter, about three miles away – and knows another couple of men living in two other tin houses a bit further off. This is his entire community, though it can hardly be called that because he lives in contented isolation. We never learn how we gets his supplies, or how he ended up there, or why there are a handful of tin hits in a sandy wasteland. As other reviewers have noted, it is a bit Beckettian – though the tone feels less bleak and more like amiable confusion.

The woman who turns up and says ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding’ is Mary Petrie, a ‘friend of a friend’, who rather imposes upon the narrator. He can’t turn her away – and she ends up moving in. But she is quickly dissatisfied with the way he does things. She is an enigma, and becomes one that he doesn’t wish to leave.

Things start to change when the three other men in his makeshift community become interested in a man they meet who lives a little further off – Michael Hawkins. The narrator hasn’t met him, but Michael Hawkins clearly has charisma and personality. This newcomer – or is he? – begins to shift the dynamics of this peculiar environment. And then other people to start to appear.

Mills is a brilliantly careful writer, and his greatest talent is the way he can pervade a novel[la] with atmosphere – without ever revealing how it’s done. Three To See The King is unsettling almost from the beginning. What makes it all the more unsettling is that it isn’t at all clear WHY it’s unsettling. It seems to be a simple story of harmless people doing numbingly ordinary things. And yet the reader feels constantly anxious, as though there is something around the corner; some horror that has perhaps been in full sight the whole time.

Many of Mills’ novels have the cadence of a parable or fable, even if it isn’t clear what the hidden depth is. While this novella certainly has things to say about communities, power, and even cults, there is no ‘a-ha!’ moment where the puzzle falls into place and a central meaning is unveiled. The title puts you in mind of the Magi visiting Jesus, of course, as does the cover design of my edition – but that might just be another red herring. I feel rather unnerved, after finishing Three To See The King. But in a good way. I have spent time in the presence of a master.