Reviews » The Crime of it All

George Pelecanos’ The Cut reviewed by Conor Tannam

May 162012

George Pelecanos has previously worked as a line cook, bartender, dishwasher, and shoe salesman. He has also achieved considerable critical success since the publication of his debut novel in 1992, and especially since his involvement as a writer on HBO’s seminal show The Wire. His books are known for their snappy dialogue and social commentary, which may be why Esquire magazine refers to him as the ‘poet laureate of the D.C. crime world’. On such an esteemed background the launch of a new detective series based in Washington ought to be cause for considerable excitement. Unfortunately, The Cut does not quite attain the high standard of Pelecanos’ best.

Spero Lucas is an Iraq war veteran who has carved out a living as an investigator for a defence lawyer. He’s 29, athletic, and, like so many of the author’s characters, has a penchant for soul music, which allows his author to smoothly segue into the story’s soundtrack, a chorus in counterpoint to his Greek descent and family relationships. When an incarcerated crime boss hires him to investigate a case of theft, Spero is soon embroiled in a world of guns, violence, and drugs. His interactions with two young drug dealers point to the futility of the war on drugs, an idea that Pelecanos has expounded at length throughout his career.

There is much to be admired in The Cut. Sections of the dialogue show Pelecanos at his best. Spero’s elder brother Leo, is a teacher and their conversations are familiar to anyone who has ever quarrelled with a sibling: “’He’s already grown Ma,’ said Spero, passing the orzo to Leo. He’s not gonna get taller if he eats more, he’s just gonna get fat’ … ‘That’s all muscle back there,’ said Leo. ‘That’s why I can’t wear those skinny Levis like you do. I got a man’s build.’” Such moments of domesticity are a trusted staple of Pelecanos’ character development, and once again they provide welcome relief from the genre’s tired and wired stereotypes in their cycles of gratuitous violence. When he even offers up a few choice reading references, Pelecanos is in his element, never more so than when Spero’s brother gets to read Elmore Leonard as a homework assignment.

In short, The Cut has much to celebrate, but several factors cloud if not collapse the central story arc. For instance, sections of the book read like an advertisement for Apple’s Iphone, and since Spero is so conspicuous in his overuse of the phone, the Hollywood product placement eventually eclipses his surveillance work. What is worse, while the novel’s main villain is suitably despicable, we never get the sense that he or his nefarious underlings might pose a viable threat to the war veteran. This comes as the actual surprise, since most of Pelecanos’ previous novels threatened their far from invincible protagonists with a violent dénouement. The absence of such ambiguity finally leads to another absence – that of his trademark tense atmosphere. Here’s hoping that the sequel drops the dross and picks up the pace.

Marcia Clark’s Guilt by Association reviewed by Phoebe Ladenburg

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Feb 242012

Marcia Clarke’s first foray into fiction has all the ingredients of a big success: as the lead prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder case, Clarke has first-hand experience of the inner workings of LA law enforcement and the grimy and sordid crime scene that goes with it.

The book begins promisingly (if a little predictably): Rachael Knight, a workaholic DA, addicted to truth, justice and (possibly) booze finds herself immersed in a trial involving her equally committed, handsome young colleague, Jake, who is found dead in a seedy hotel room with a teenage boy in what appears to be a sex-related murder-suicide. Banking on gut feeling, Knight and her sassy, sexy cop friend Bailey Keller break all the rules in the book and ignore protocol to embark on disentangling this mystery and clearing Jake’s name. In the mean time, the two must solve a rape case left over from Jake’s case load.

So far, so fascinating. But what proceeds is a confused and unsatisfying narrative that fails to deliver on the promises it makes at the beginning. The narrative is heaving with frequent and unnecessarily detailed descriptions of meals and wardrobe selection and of nuggets of Knight’s petty and often boring thoughts. And Graden? The sex interest that promises to offer so much at the start? After a few uneventful dates, Clarke completely drops the subject until a brief reference at the very end of the book.

The novel predominantly focuses on the rape case which, although it ends up being tied up with Jake’s murder, means that for chapters on end the reader gets nothing to build their suspense or intrigue relating to the case that they had initially invested in. There are just too many factors of the narrative that do not add up, that fizzle-out and die or that are left dangling like damp squibs to give the reader the juicy (if basic) satisfaction they are after in an LA crime fiction novel such as this.

That being the case, there is reason to believe that if the calorie counting Knight and Co return in a sequel they may count on Clark’s ambition to fatten up the story. If she follows the trend in Guilt by Association and puts more meat on the bones of her courtroom dramas, she might soon entice more fans of early John Grisham into her dog eat dog world.

Gerard Brennan’s Wee Rockets reviewed by Claire Hayes

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Feb 142012

The blurb for Wee Rockets bills it as a “gritty, urban morality tale” which follows “a gang of fourteen-year-old hoods as they rampage through West Belfast, fearless and forever upping the ante in their anti-social crimes.” This is a little misleading. The novel certainly does follow a number of the gang members through drug-taking, drinking, accidents, and increasingly violent crimes. We see Joe the leader of the Wee Rockets relinquish his control of the gang and try to figure out his own way in the world, followed faithfully by his best friend Danny, and we follow the gang’s new, and disturbing, leader as he widens the gang’s horizons and brings his own violent streak into play in the gang’s crime spree. Wee Rockets, however, gives the reader more than a tale of the antics of an underage gang.

Brennan introduces a large number of equally interesting and memorable characters whose lives intertwine with those of Joe and Danny. Joe’s mother, who is desperately trying to keep her son out of serious trouble, and Danny’s brother, who in his hopeless relationship is trying to keep his brother on the straight and narrow, offer unexpected domestic insights. Joe’s father Dermot, the petty criminal who has returned to Belfast, finds it greatly changed since he fled to Britain years earlier. Stephen McVeigh, football star, is the community agitator, outraged at the free reign given to the Wee Rockets and those like them in the absence of the decommissioned Provos and the PSNI who seem uninterested in the previously (and probably still) hostile territory of the West Belfast estate. All of these characters’ stories interweave with the Wee Rockets’ to enrich and enlarge the novel and make it much more than a simple morality tale.

Wee Rockets presents the reader with a picture of a West Belfast estate in crisis, the space left by the Provos and the breakdown of community unity leaving the place wide open to a generation who have not seen the same troubles as their parents or older relations. These kids have taken on Hip-Hop, drug dealing, and gang membership as a way to pass long, summer holidays. Though the Troubles are over, the violence remains. Transmuted into muggings and beatings, it permeates all aspects of the novel.

Brennan has been compared to Irvine Welsh and in some ways this is a very obvious comparison to make. Themes familiar to readers of Welsh will certainly be obvious in Wee Rockets. Where the writers differ is in their use of local accent. I, as a Free-Stater, would have found it an even more compelling read if there was a little more Belfast dialect in the dialogue. The odd phrase pops up but the richness of the Ulster dialect was a little lacking. It left some scenes seeming somewhat flat and lacking in authenticity. Unfortunately, my Belfast accent is just not up to scratch and I could have done with a little help.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t have been less enthused about reading Wee Rockets, having only a cursory knowledge of Northern Irish writing, gained from a seminar I attended some time ago now. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As soon as I started it I was pulled in. It’s one of those books you read without realising you’ve spent any time reading it. It’s well paced, and it is only when you’ve finished it that you realise how much food for thought it provides. What more could you want?

Amanda Kyle Williams’ The Stranger You Seek reviewed by Phoebe Ladenburg

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Dec 302011

Amanda Kyle Williams’ The Stranger You Seek is by no means your typical literary apprenticeship. Williams writes with a confidence and complexity that appears well-versed and matured. The heroine, Keye Street, is perfectly flawed: she is feisty and, no-shit, she has self-esteem related addictions, but over and above it all she is Good. Having been dismissed from the FBI several years previously due to alcohol abuse, Street gets called up by A.P.D. lieutenant Aaron Rauser who turns out to be just as flawed and equally admirable, with a healthy dose of sex-appeal thrown in for good measure.

The case? To find the creepily named Wishbone killer whose horrific and gory killings are partnered with taunting messages to the police and the media, making this savage killer a PR nightmare to boot. This is the kind of thriller that lets you think you are smart, before sharply changing direction to reveal something you never suspected.

My only criticism would be that Williams denies the reader the chance to identify the killer for oneself; character remains detached from plot, and few, if any, clues are given as to the true identity. That said, I am prepared to admit this may be due to my own stupidity and I therefore challenge you to be a better crime solver than I am. However, the ‘checking off’ of the list of suspects is clever enough to overshadow this.

The Stranger You Seek is not for the faint hearted. It took me a while to start to write this review as I was reluctant to return to sickening images in a hurry. It deals with the sickest kind of murderous mind: the purely selfish, disarmingly normal, grotesquely sexual, and chillingly remorseless – the kind of mind that smiles through nightmares.

Williams has written a great novel, a novel that touches the raw, core fears readers may have briefly explored in their childhood and then locked away safely, until now.

Andrea Maria Schenkel’s The Murder Farm reviewed by Claire Hayes

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Dec 142011

Andrea Maria Schenkel’s novel The Murder Farm won the German Crime Prize in 2008. When her novel Ice Cold won the prize in 2009, Schenkel became the first writer to win the prize twice in two years. Anthea Bell’s translation of The Murder Farm shows why.

The novel opens with an unnamed narrator reminiscing about a blissful summer spent with relatives in a rural village at the end of WWII, a village to which the narrator decides to return in order to investigate an unsolved, brutal murder. The details of this crime are only revealed to the reader much later in the novel, and there really isn’t much more to be said about the plot of this intriguing novel. The beauty of the book is in the tripartite narrative, for Schenkel uses three distinct styles within the book: There is the testimony of the locals, presumably collected by the unnamed narrator, then there is a third person narrative which generally elaborates on the sketchy information provided by the locals, and finally there are prayers which either precede or conclude the third person narrative.

The three styles are merged together expertly to create an extremely unsettling and truly impressive narrative. The testimonies of the locals range from gossipy to vague and dismissive, and this gradually builds up a picture of the murdered family, a family of recluses, a family that is generally disliked or at the very least distrusted, a family with more than a few shocking skeletons in their respective closets. Seeing as the different voices of these villagers are rendered impeccably, they produce an overall picture of small village rivalries and alliances in which testimonials are juxtaposed with the eerily sparse language of the omniscient third person narrator. All along the desperate, italicised prayers destabilise the narrative further.

The overall effect is one of deepened insight into the minds and actions of the murdered family on the night of their murder, and this effect is heightened by slow and tense revelations of various details. There are no police investigations, no surly detectives, and no newspaper men. In fact, there is very little action at all, yet Schenkel manages to sustain the suspense to the very end of the novel.

The only problem I have with The Murder Farm is the fact that the unnamed narrator of the opening chapter never reappears. The testimonies, obviously collected by this character, are given without comment or reflection. To me this is an unnecessary plot device. However, the writing is so compelling and affecting that I forgot about this initial narrator until quite some time after I turned the last page. Insignificant irritants aside, this is a fascinating and beautifully written book.

Leonard Fritz’s ‘In Nine Kinds of Pain’ reviewed by Charlie Stella

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Nov 012011

In Nine Kinds of Pain, Leonard Fritz offers a Detroit back story too many of us have come to ignore; how and what and why an impoverished city is permitted to rot as if walled in from the rest of our world. He uses characters on both sides of the law to portray the hell of trying to survive hell; an alcoholic priest on the edge, in love with a prostitute the way Jesus loved Mary Magdalene; a suicidal cop in love with his wife the way a cuckold can’t get enough abuse; the prostitute seeking shelter from a killer in the arms of the church (wherein that priest falls in love – or is it much needed lust?). There’s the city itself, the cloud of doom hovering over each and all the characters in the city of Detroit as told by an omniscient voice of wisdom providing both warning and grace to the understandably (or not) naive.

Beware, for instance, the Devil’s Night. Fritz offers more than the advertised thriller in this economic gem. Social issues abound; from drugs to poverty to marital discord, suicide, loss of faith, faith in loss … you name it, this book swoops in and out of the issues of our day. I was two hundred pages into a best-selling novel I’m reading for my MFA class when the ARC for the Fritz book was close at hand. I started reading and didn’t stop. I’ll go back to the funny best-seller later, I decided. In Nine Kinds of Pain was way too gripping and more my kind of a read to have to wait another four hundred pages of very well crafted humour.

Fritz strategically places graphic cartoon-like strips in this work. As one who never read (or is ever likely to read) a graphic novel, they surprised me. I thought them brilliant. Last year’s Pulitzer Prize winning fiction (A Visit from the Goon Squad) also used graphics (including a Power Point presentation). I suspect A Visit from the Goon Squad didn’t work for me because of the bands/music references I just wasn’t aware of. In any event, I took three tries at the prize winner and never finished reading it. No knock on the book; it just wasn’t for me. Reading In Nine Kinds of Pain, I was quickly absorbed, and the third time I’ll read this one, it’ll be because I reread most books I find to be extra special.

Lenny Fritz, a modern day Hubert Selby Jr./Jack Kerouac, has written a gem. It isn’t Elmore Leonard’s Detroit. It’s darker, it’s colder, it isn’t guised in clever dialogue that makes us smile; this dialogue is the real and gritty deal. In a word, it’s better. Hats off to New Pulp Press for this discovery and this gift to us all.

Charlie Stella’s ‘Cheapskates’ reviewed by Ryan van Runkle

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Oct 112011

Charlie Stella’s fourth novel, Cheapskates, is low-rent mob behaviour at its best. If following the lives of New Jersey underworld scum for three hundred pages isn’t your idea of a good date, well, think again. There is much in this medium sized book to heighten your awareness of life – or even just to make you laugh.

Cheapskates follows Reese Waters as he navigates the Nation of Islam, the New Jersey Mob, and his best friend’s ex-wife – a woman who behaves as if she were spawned by Bernie Madoff and Rush Limbaugh. Cheapskates is full of seriously talented prose. Witness:

“Alex had just finished having sex with his girlfriend, Christine Molloy, a forty-five-year-old diner waitress from Croton-on-Hudson. Alex was thirty-eight years old, a little paunchy since he’d stopped smoking, and showing his first serious signs of balding. He turned his head from side to side in the mirror as he searched for new signs of hair loss.

‘Yikes, it’s cold in here!’ Christine yelled from the bathroom doorway.

Shivering, she pulled a bathrobe around her shoulders and sprinted across the hotel room to jump into bed. Alex wasn’t prepared for the gymnastics and spilled some soda on his chest.

‘Sheee-it,’ he said. ‘Are you crazy?’

Christine quickly dabbed at the soda spill with a napkin. She dispensed with the napkin and began to lick his chest. Alex pulled away.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Take a Valium or something. I need some time here.’

Christine bit her lower lip to shape her best seductive smile. She was still attractive despite the hard life she’d led. Except for a few blotches of cellulite on the backs of her legs and rump, some stretch marks around her nipples, and a few faint acne scars, she continued to turn heads, especially when her very large breasts were held together with a bra.

Licking her lips as she spoke, she told Alex, ‘I was hoping to speed your trip, baby.’”

This is exciting stuff. And though Christine has only one other scene – she gets blackout drunk at a restaurant – she’s my favourite character. She reminds me of another Molloy, as imagined by the Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. In the final novel of Beckett’s trilogy, he writes: “And that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage.” Well, America, we did the mob thing and the corporate crime thing and the empire thing. What next? Where are we speeding to? And, perhaps most importantly, is it possible to take the Christine’s of this world with us?

Cheapskates is a fun book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in quirky and illicit lifestyles. I think it would be a good fit for anyone who does shift work or is unemployed. (Read: I think it would be a good fit for all of us.)

Declan Burke’s ‘Absolute Zero Cool’ reviewed by Conor Tannam

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Sep 282011

In 2011, Declan Burke edited Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the Twenty-First Century, an anthology of the very best of Irish crime fiction. In the years prior to this testament to talent, his blog (Crime Always Pays) had established itself as a comprehensive guide to quality Irish and international crime writing. But with this new novel – a personal best that’s been a long time coming – Declan Burke has gold-plated the genre with what The Irish Times termed ‘screwball noir’.

Declan Burke’s Absolute Zero Cool challenges the perceived limitations of the crime fiction genre as much as the perceived limitations of Ireland’s current financial woes. Dreamlike and invigorating, it combines surrealism with the best of noir fiction in an enthralling reminiscence of Flann O’ Brien’s At Swim-two-birds.

There are three narratives featured in this novel as one Declan Burke (a crime writer and blogger) attempts to complete his long promised book. Intertwining these separate strands are excerpts from an unpublished novel with strong philosophical overtones. The fictional Burke is offered advice by Billy, a man claiming to be a character of his from a previous novel who may have murdered hospitalised seniors as well as his own girlfriend. Disillusioned not only with the hospital, but all that the building represents as an institution, Billy is determined to coolly blow the loathsome edifice to an absolute zero. As if this were not enough criminal existentialism, Billy waxes lyrical about his metaphysical desire to rid Ireland of what he sees as a useless and ineffectual medical establishment.

Burke’s writing is sharp, funny, and excruciatingly honest, as when he observes that “writing and masturbation have in common temporary relief and the illusion of achievement,” never more so than when one struggles with pressures from one’s wife, one’s publisher, and one’s inescapable Billy, that delightful muse and devastating critic. So any guarded praise heaped upon the excellent novel is quantified by, well, less guarded criticism, and any indulgence of low language or aspirations of high art are candidly edited by Billy as he attempts to persuade Burke to finally write the novel that would do him some form of justice, the novel Jane Austen would have written for him.

Yet what is most noteworthy is that the real Burke can let his reader off the leash inside the fictional Burke’s head without losing creative control of either. Absolute Zero Cool is far more than a post-modern exemplar of a noir thriller. The valid criticisms of mass waste within the Irish healthcare system, and within Irish society at large, strike at the right target. They should also strike the right chord with a post-party – yet not so post-terror – Ireland, if only because particular vitriol is reserved for the country’s trinity of disgrace: bankers, republican terrorists, and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Thus as we scale the height – or perhaps the depth – of this political satire, it makes a hilarious kind of nonsense that a desert island is suggested as a suitable retirement home for this threesome; a desert island on which tourists play piggy in the middle with them and a few rockets.

Absolute Zero Cool is a genuinely original and inventive novel, and its brevity leaves the reader wanting more, more Declan Burke. After all, the man has crafted a clever, personal, and charming story, a testament to the prize worthy best of Irish crime fiction.

Frank Bill’s ‘Crimes in Southern Indiana’ reviewed by Charlie Stella

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Sep 142011

Community Organizers Beware. We often wonder how or why others act in ways we can’t begin to understand. Whether it’s violence for the sake of violence or violence for the sake of survival, we often shake our collective heads in amazement at what men are willing to do to one another. Most often that type of head shaking has to do with images we see on a cable news show reporting the insanity going on somewhere across the world where limbs are being cut off with machetes or a minority indigenous population is being gassed or some poor woman is being stoned to death (often by members of her own family) because she’s been raped by some piece of shit who found the opportunity to do so.

And while there are times we have similar head-shaking reactions to some of the violence in our urban areas (i.e., during particularly destructive riots when many of the people doing the looting and burning are doing so within their own neighborhoods), we don’t often wonder about the backwoods of America. Daniel Woodrell certainly opened some eyes with his body of work featuring the Ozarks. Cormac McCarthy has scripted a few masterpieces as dark as any you’ll find (so don’t stop at seeing the movie, No Country for Old Men, read the rest of his brilliant works). Recently there’s been Bonnie Jo Campbell’s collection of stories, American Salvage, which I learned about through Patti Abbott’s blog. It is a wonderful and revealing collection of stories dealing with what happens when jobs leave a community to waste.

Frank Bill joins a special class of authors who have brought home the realization that it’s time to store the American Dream alongside that of the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. It just ain’t doing it anymore. Crimes in Southern Indiana showcases interweaving stories and characters living the hell of a hopeless existence; desperate people living by the only code that counts, the only one they’ve ever known – survival. Clan comes first, then a culture that doesn’t include the law and requires the strictest kind of adherence. And while some manage to retain their humanity, it’s never easy and it’s never clean.

It is essentially a pragmatic world; people making the best of what they have. Be it cooking, selling or distributing meth, raccoon hunting or dog fighting, the people in these stories are not ashamed of how they make it day to day. They can hunt and fish and cook meth, curse and deliver raw violence as soon as say hello. Women (children) are sold off for sex to pay debts (in one story, to pay for cancer medications) and rape is sometimes a thrill in a local bar (the Leavenworth) where a few men gather to engage in a sexual assault the way others might play darts.

The time is now and the place is as brutal as any state of nature known to man. People are living off what they know and who they can depend on. ‘Omerta’ in Southern Indiana is for real and not what the modern day mob has turned into a Boy Scout oath joke; the people in these stories don’t speak to the law without the genuine fear of a horrific end.

Author Frank Bill offers tales of families way beyond crisis. Nobody in this collection is waiting for a modified mortgage. Living in a shack isn’t necessarily shameful, it’s shelter. And when a kid crosses the path of a war vet lost in the adrenalin of meth and booze and the images of war he can’t escape, some might say the kid has been spared the brutal future that awaits him.

No, amici, there are no community organizers promising hope and change, not to this part of America. The question is, is this where the rest of America is headed? The answer, I’m afraid, is very possibly so. And if I haven’t mentioned it yet, it’s high time I do. The writing is terrific. Frank Bill has the chops necessary to keep this ball rolling a long way down the literary road. Some examples from his stories in Crimes in Southern Indiana:

From: Officer Down (Tweakers)

“But in a world that took and took from the workingman, Moon guessed there was a breaking point between right and wrong.

He hadn’t seen Rusty Yates in years. His wife had left him after he’d lost a good factory job, at a battery separator plant that had sold out, moved to Mexico. Hired a cheaper workforce. Cost a lot of men and women their livelihood.”

From: Rough Company

“His uncle Lazarus explained, ‘Some people believe sweating their lives away in a factory is making a living. That dream died when Regan became president couple years back. Scamming. Swindling. Stealing. It’s the only life your uncle Lazarus and mama know. And it’s all you’ll ever know, little man.’”

From: Old Testament Wisdom

“Rusted ringer washers. Gas stoves. Dry rotted tires and busted television sets decorated the flat rock hollows. The county yards of rusted trailers and broken-down farmhouses with abandoned red clay tractors. Vehicles on cinder blocks. It was the poor man’s fairy tale of rural survival. Hines could smell the survival’s waste like the sweat that his pores excreted as he sped down the valley road.”

From: Trespassing Between Heaven and Hell

“Deputy Pat Daniels stood shaking his head, watching the boy being pulled from the green river. He wondered why God sometimes took the simple and innocent, let unexplained evils of the world live on.”

Allan Guthrie’s ‘Slammer’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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Sep 092011

A claustrophobic scream through the dark recesses of human behaviour, Allan Guthrie’s Slammer is a worthy read for those with a sense of grim curiosity as to the bestial cunning residing within the civilised mind. This morbid Scotsman presents an ugly exploration of what goes on when the lights go out, the hideous cruelty that occurs when ordinary decent respect is dispensed with and the law of the jungle prevails. Reminiscent of that sick guilty terror that accompanies schoolyard victimisation, that anarchic excitement that becomes all too real with no responsible adult present, this is a knife-edge thriller of considerable panache and skill. Yet in the world of schoolyard horrors, a teacher always comes running, someone’s parents usually find out and nobody wants to go to the principal’s office. When the sanity of everyday adult life is suspended, when the rules-of-engagement go out the window… what happens?

Slammer revolves around Nicholas Glass, a young prison officer, detailing his descent as he proves unable to cope with the stresses of the job. Guthrie treads a fine line between sympathy and ridicule, allowing his reader to empathise with our antihero’s disintegrating family life, his disarmingly pathetic sense of selfhood. Essentially though, Glass is a sap. A walkover, an out-and-out softy, an utter wuss, with his heart in exactly the wrong place. Struggling time and again to deal with the circumstances of which he’s a victim, you’ll find yourself in constant disbelief at his poor decision-making, concurrently hoping against hope that he’ll somehow come out on top. Meanwhile there’s an element of trainwreck-fascination to the plot development, a disbelief that poor old Glass can fall so far, so fast, so hard. Guthrie wields considerable skill in convincing us to suspend our disbelief throughout the novel, an admirable feat that leads to a sense of culpability, a gnawing paranoia that we too are somehow responsible.

The escalating manic desperation is rabid, almost psychedelic in its unreality, yet all the more terrifying for its utterly convincing delivery. Guthrie carefully constructs a panopticon of paranoid terror, a hideous state of constant fear. The author is economical with his prose, leaving just enough to the imagination and ensuring that a hint is enough to let his reader’s imagination plummet into ever-darkening pits of misery. Brutally engaging similes and chilling metaphors continually build the oppressive static tension of the Hilton, as its denizens call the modern Scottish prison in which the novel is set. The descent is relentless, Glass’ nightmare ever worsening. Crucially, the madness remains entertaining without being ridiculous, fun though chilling, such elements being reminiscent of the novels of Thomas Harris (The Silence Of The Lambs, etc).

As Glass slips into addiction and paranoid schizophrenia, matters steadily become more nebulous and the author does an excellent job of imparting to his reader the psychotic terror of a drug-splintered mind. The feckless protagonist backs himself into a series of corners, attempting to play the various criminals and prison guards off against each other in a manner far too sophisticated for his addled semi-consciousness. Yet the convoluted series of events leading to the climax becomes so detailed that it’s hard to maintain credibility, and to a certain extent the novel begins to run out of steam towards the end. A deft hand ultimately wins out, and Guthrie reels the wayward elements back in to tie things up with a stylish climax reminiscent of dark modern cinema, a vivid and uncomfortable joyride recalling psychedelic crime thrillers The Machinist or Memento.

Clever and engaging, complicated but undemanding, with a primitive sophistication in its scope, Slammer is a great read and one which never cheapens itself by taking the easy way out. Concurrently making some valid (if grisly) points about memory, guilt and psychosis, Guthrie transcends the rigid dichotomies which all too often cast our heroes and villains in easily dismissed shades of black and white; I for one will be eager to see where the future takes this talented author.

Older Entries

The Crime of it All

George Pelecanos’ The Cut reviewed by Conor Tannam

Marcia Clark’s Guilt by Association reviewed by Phoebe Ladenburg

Gerard Brennan’s Wee Rockets reviewed by Claire Hayes

Amanda Kyle Williams’ The Stranger You Seek reviewed by Phoebe Ladenburg

Andrea Maria Schenkel’s The Murder Farm reviewed by Claire Hayes

Leonard Fritz’s ‘In Nine Kinds of Pain’ reviewed by Charlie Stella

Charlie Stella’s ‘Cheapskates’ reviewed by Ryan van Runkle

Declan Burke’s ‘Absolute Zero Cool’ reviewed by Conor Tannam

Frank Bill’s ‘Crimes in Southern Indiana’ reviewed by Charlie Stella

Allan Guthrie’s ‘Slammer’ reviewed by Cormac O’Siochain

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