REVIEWS

SMOKE KINGS . . . Between the covers

Titles of books and movies can be meaningless word pairings dreamed up by twenty-something publicists. Remember the scene in one of the Naked Gun movies at the Oscars? In the Best Picture shortlist were spoof films like Naked Attraction, Violent Lunch, Fatal Affair, Final Proposal, Basic Analysis..? So, what to make of Smoke Kings? A few moments spent on Google rewarded me with a poem written in 1905 by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The writer was an activist years ahead of his time, and by adapting his words, Jahmal Mayfield nails his colours to the mast, although his Amazon bio declares that Smoke Kings was inspired by Kimberly Jones’ passionate viral video, “How can we win?” After his cousin, Darius, has been been beaten to death by white teenagers, Nate plots his revenge. Rather than taking out the boys who killed his cousin, Nate targets the descendants of white men and women who, he argues, are responsible for lynchings, racist beatings and murders committed by their grandparents decades previously. Nate and three friends – Rachel, Isiah and Joshua – exact a kind of third party vengeance on a succession of targeted individuals. Most escape death only because they commit to paying sums of money every month to deserving causes in the black community.

Inevitably, the quartet bite off more than they can chew. One of their reprieved victims hires a former cop – Mason Farmer- on a ‘seek and destroy’ mission. He is freshly sacked from a private security firm after he fails to tick the right number of boxes on their Inclusion and Diversity check list, and he sets out to nail the quartet of avengers.

Nate and his buddies make another serious strategic error when they kill a random redneck called Chipper, and bury him in a remote grave. Sadly for them, Chipper’s brother Samuel is the charismatic leader of a violently racist gang, and they are determined to avenge Chipper’s death.

Mayfield is at his most assured when describing the complex relationships between the four would-be avengers, and how they sometimes bicker about how black they actually are. Mason Farmer, too, has his preconceptions about race and identity tested when, while searching for Nate and company, he meets a mixed race woman – a campaigner for justice – called Elizabeth, and falls for her, despite her antipathy towards him. Farmer’s attitudes towards race and identity are already complicated, as his estranged daughter has a son by a black father.

The racist gang term themselves The Righteous Boys: they are deeply unpleasant, and live even worse lives:
“He drove on into the night, past fields of wild grass, old farmhouse buildings slumping like stacks of damp cardboard boxes, useless tractor equipment rusted the colour of dirty bricks. A forgotten and desolate wasteland. No wonder The Righteous Boys had chosen to call the area home.”

I read the novel pretty much back to back with re-reading a couple of Harlem Detectives novels by Chester Himes, and it left me wondering if someone had written A Rage In Harlem or The Real Cool Killers today, whether or not anyone would publish them, such is the glee with which Himes portrays the eccentricities and sometimes deeply venal nature of some of the characters. Smoke Kings is very different, as there is little ambiguity about where good and evil reside. The narrative of the book raises all kinds of very contemporary questions about ancestral guilt, both on an individual and national level. Smoke Kings is a breathless journey down the bumpy track that leads to revenge, and is published by Melville House, available now.

February 8, 2024 0

ARCADIA . . . Between the covers

Psychopathy and comedy are not natural companions, but Guy Portman has this strange relationship down to a ‘T’ In his novels Necropolis (2014), Sepultura (2018) and Golgotha (2019) we followed the rise and fall of the elegant, analytical and ruthless killer Dyson Devereux. Then, in Emergence (2023), we learned that he had a love child. Well. let’s rephrase that. He had a child. The mother was a well-meaning but rather naive Antiguan social worker called Rakeesha Robinson and the youngster was christened Horatio.

Although Horatio never met his father he is, as they used to say, a chip off the old block. He is fascinated by trigonometry and algebra and is prone to instant acts of extreme violence, but also capable of meticulous planning to set up his deeds. An example of the latter was the way in which he disposed of mum’s loathsome boyfriend in Emergence. My review of that book described the killing in some detail, but as it caused me to be banned by Amazon, that’s all I will say here. You can find the hilarious details by clicking the link.

Seeking to give Horatio a new start, Rakeesha has taken him to Antigua, where the two of them are to stay with her extended family. Incidentally, as can sometimes happen with genetics, Horatio is as white as his father was, which makes him distinctive among the native Antiguans. He starts school, and soon establishes himself as brighter than average, but his Caribbean idyll is marred by the fact that he has to work weekends and holidays in his grandfather’s laundry centre, piling insanitary bedding from the tourist hotels into the washers, and then ironing the same hotels’ tablecloths with – as you would expect from Horatio – geometric precision.

As you might expect from our lad, he soon finds a way to boost his meagre wages from the laundromat. Antigua is full of low-rent tourists, many of who are anxious to score drugs, and Horatio finds that his innocent demeanour, coupled with his skin colour, enable him to establish a nice little business, buying product from a dissolute and disreputable dealer who lives in a shack just out of town, and then selling it to the European tourists (at a healthy profit).

Horatio, figuratively holding his nose when he goes to the dealer’s house, notices two things: first, a handgun badly hidden underneath a cushion and, second, a tin cash box in which the dealer keeps his cash. Putting these two observations to work allows Horatio to rid Antigua of a parasite and enrich himself to the tune of several thousand XCD (Eastern Caribbean Dollars) He also seizes an opportunity to exact revenge on a dimwitted local youth who has been harassing him.

Guy Portman is a wonderful satirist. He targets the cant, pomposity and box-ticking that have become ever-present backdrops to most people’s lives in Britain. In Horatio Robinson he has created a malevolent hero who continues to disprove Lincoln’s adage, in that – so far – he has managed to fool all of the people, and all of the time. However, like his late father, is his luck due to run out?

February 4, 2024 0

AN HONEST LIVING . . . Between the covers

TAXONOMY – The current taxonomic system now has eight levels in its hierarchy, from lowest to highest, they are: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain.

I throw in this apparently random piece of information merely to suggest that An Honest Living does not fit easily into a genre, and many readers, especially of crime fiction, love genres and little compartments into which books can be placed. This is the story of a New York lawyer, apparently the author himself, who becomes involved in a complex case involving arcane transcripts of historic legal cases. Sounds dull? Yes, probably, but the actual content transcends the banal description. This is, in no particular order, a love poem to a 2000s New York City that, two decades later, has all but disappeared. It is an account of a decent man drawn into a complex conspiracy. It tells of men and women who, despite their elevated social status, can act with the veniality and simple greed of lesser mortals.

Our man has left a well-paid corporate legal position to work for himself, trusting in his innate skills to keep the bills paid. When he is hired by the estranged wife of a prominent bibliophile to denounce the man as a scoundrel, he accepts the case – and the bundle of high value notes – with alacrity. A few weeks later, when the man’s wife is exposed as a fraud – and Newton Reddick’s real wife appears on the scene, Murphy is in a world of trouble. As it happens, he gets away without being sued for libel, and he also gets to keep the cash. More importantly, however, he establishes a relationship with Anna Reddick, a successful author writing under the pseudonym AM Byrne.

When Newton Reddick is found hanged in a seedy hotel, matters take a distinctly sinister turn. Is there a connection with Anna Reddick’s father, a rich but not-entirely-honest businessman?

Although I enjoyed the book, I would take issue with the back cover blurb which calls the novel “hard-boiled”. If you are expecting anything resembling Noir as in, say, Jim Thompson, Ted Lewis or Derek Raymond you will not find it. This is much more delicate stuff and we are taken on a stylish and nostalgic meander through the streets and districts of New York as it was two decades ago, in the company of some intriguing characters, whose vicissitudes we share. Published by No Exit Press, this edition is available now.

February 1, 2024 0

THE SPY COAST . . . Between the covers

Have you ever wondered were CIA spooks go when they are pensioned off? Tess Gerritsen tells us that a number of them have settled down in the tiny Maine harbour town of Purity. Among them is Maggie Bird, once a stone cold killer for the Company, but now just a chicken farmer with the common ailments – such as aching joints – shared by all senior citizens. Her neighbours are mostly of a similar age and background – particularly Ben Diamond, Declan Rose and the elderly couple Lloyd and Ingrid Slocum.

When Maggie is visited by a current CIA operative, a young woman who identifies herself only as Bianca, she is reminded of an unwelcome part of her past, in the shape of a fellow agent called Diana Ward. Ward is still active, but has gone missing, her bosses are concerned, and are offering to pay Maggie to help trace the missing woman. Maggie rejects the offer, saying she does not care if Ward is dead or alive.

Why the indifference? It is, as they say, complicated, and we learn that Ward and Maggie go back a long way, with the pivotal point in their professional relationship being an attempt, years earlier to take out a British wheeler-dealer – and international gangster – called Phillip Hardwicke. Long story short, the end result was a CIA sting that ended in disaster for Maggie. Her doctor husband, Danny, had been working as Hardwicke’s personal physician, and a private jet they were were traveling in left Malta, only to explode mid-air and crash into the sea with the loss of all on board.

Back in present day Maine, Maggie is with her friends, discussing the mysterious visit of Bianca, when she hears that police have surrounded her house. Rushing home to investigate, she finds there is a corpse lying in the frozen snow of her driveway. It is the woman who called herself Bianca, and she has been tortured bt then professionally despatched with two bullets to the head.

Maggie realises that the carnage is all about her and her past and so reluctantly she packs a few things, arranges some chicken-sitters, and goes back on the road to see if she can exorcise the ghosts of her past. Her travels take her into immediate and present danger, in Thailand and across Europe. My copy of the book came with a couple of cocktail recipes (above). The Spy Coast has all the hallmarks of a classic mainstream American thriller – taut as piano wire, danger round every corner and with convincing portraits of exotic locations.

February 1, 2024 1

THE LONGEST GOODBYE . . . Between the covers

This tough and unflinching Tyneside police thriller is the latest outing for Mari Hannah’s DCI Kate Daniels. The Longest Goodbye is the ninth in a series which began in 2012 with The Murder Wall. We are in late December 2022, and in Newcastle, like other cities across Britain, revellers are raising two fingers to the recently discovered Omicron variant of the Coronavirus, and are out in the clubs and pubs wearing – because it is Newcastle, after all – as little as possible, despite the freezing weather. Two lads in particular – homeward bound from overseas, and just off the plane – are determined to have a few beers before being reunited with mum and dad.

However, neither the two bonny lads nor mum and dad quite fit the ‘home for Christmas’ template. Lee and Jackson Bradshaw are only in their twenties, but have already done serious time for violence, and are returning from a European bolthole where they have been hiding from British police. Mum and Dad? Don Bradshaw is a career criminal, but pales into insignificance beside his wife Christine, who is the ruthless boss of the region’s biggest crime syndicate.

When the two prodigal sons are gunned down on the doorstep of their parents’ (recently rented) home just as they are about to sing ‘Silent Night‘, la merde frappe le ventilateur (pardon my French) The police are called and Don Bradshaw, brandishing the handgun dropped by one of his sons, is shot dead by a police marksman. No-one on the staff of Northumbria police will mourn three dead Bradshaws, but for Kate Daniels, the incident opens up a particularly unpleasant can of worms. Three years earlier, her best friend and police colleague Georgina Ioannou was found dead in a patch of woodland. Shot in the back. Executed. And it was the Bradshaw boys who were prime suspects.

Kate is forced to think the unthinkable: that Georgina’s twins, Oscar and Charlotte, now both police officers, were involved; even worse is the thought that Georgina’s husband Nico, although ostensibly a peaceful restaurateur, has avenged his wife’s murder. Revisiting old cases is never easy, and this one is made even worse by the fact that the Senior Investigating Officer at the time, was lazy, incompetent, and all-too-willing to cut corners.

Mari Hannah does not spare our sensibilities. She takes us through the painful process of self-examination one uncomfortable step at a time. It isn’t just Kate Daniels who must own up to past mistakes and errors of judgment, it is the whole Major Incident Team. Meanwhile, although the appalling Christine Bradshaw is safely behind bars facing a murder charge (the Firearms Officer she brained with a baseball bat has since died) like a badly treated tumour, malignant cells remain, and these men, enabled by her corrupt lawyer, are hard at work on the streets and in the pubs, clubs and private homes of Newcastle, determined to prevent the police from discovering the truth.

The Longest Goodbye, with its gentle nod to the Raymond Chandler thriller of almost the same name, grips from the first page, and we are fed the reddest of red herrings, one after the other, until Mari Hannah reveals a murderer who I certainly had not suspected. While few mourn the two dead criminals, when their killer is finally unmasked it is heartbreaking on so many levels. This is superior stuff from one of our finest writers. The Longest Goodbye is published by Orion and was published on 18th January.

January 24, 2024 1

THE RUNNING WOLF . . . Between the covers

In Helen Steadman’s Solstice (click to read the review) she showed us the astonishing capacity for malice that lurked in the hearts of some Puritan Christians. In The Running Wolf, set slightly later in time, sectarian divisions are more in the background as she draws us into a Britain in the late years of the 17th century and the first decades of the 18th century. In 1688, when the Catholic King James II was replaced by the hastily imported Protestant William of Orange, the sectarian divide was not healed, but merely temporarily bridged.

Central to the story is an unusual migration – that of sword makers, based in the German town of Solingen who, in 1688, moved, lock stock and barrel, to the tiny settlement of Shotley Bridge in County Durham. The reason for their move was basically economic. Solingen was almost literally bursting at the seams with sword makers, and work was becoming increasingly hard to come by. The departing craftsmen and their families, however, faced the wrath of the exclusive town guilds – to whom they had sworn an oath never to reveal the crucial secret techniques which made a Solingen sword one of the best in the world.

Hermann Molle (who actually existed) makes the journey, with his family, to Shotley Bridge, and slowly builds his business again. As Lutherans they are, to an extent, on the right side of the ‘Protestant Angels’, but the supporters – the Jacobites – of the exiled King James are growing in strength and, particularly across the English Channel, their numbers begin to pose a significant threat. Check this historical timeline:

We watch as Hermann, his family – and the other German exiles – gradually rebuild their lives in Shotley Bridge, integrating as necessary, but preserving their own culture and customs. Their swords are, initially much sought after, but as the century draws to a close the craftsmen begin to feel the winds of change. While some men of wealth are still prepared to pay for a well made sword, the blades are beginning to be valued more for ornamental use than as lethal weapons, and the smiths of the future will have to turn their hands to fashioning gun barrels rather than cutting edges.

The men of Shotley Bridge have another problem – what we would nowadays call cash flow. Customers are not paying their bills, but the dealers who provide the raw material insist on being paid in full and on time. Hermann takes a risk, returns to Solingen and attempts to smuggle a consignment of German blades back into England. He is caught, and thrown into Morpeth gaol, with every expectation that he will be hanged for his pains.

Helen Steadman tells a gripping story, using the twin timelines of the Germans establishing their craft alongside the River Derwent and, using a corrupt gaoler as narrator, Hermann’s time of misery as he languishes in the squalor of his prison cell. There is fascinating detail about the craft of sword making, set against the rumbling of military and political events far away, but equally mesmerising is the way Helen Steadman captures the minutiae of the daily lives of Hermann and his family. This is historical fiction of the first order. The Running Wolf is published by Impress Books and is available now.

January 18, 2024 2

THE ESSENTIAL HARLEM DETECTIVES . . . Between the covers

To say that Chester Himes lived the life he wrote about is not strictly true, but his life was full of incident. His childhood was fraught with unhappy events, including being indirectly responsible for his brother’s blindness, and as a young man he did serious jail time for armed robbery. Fired from his job as a Hollywood screenwriter because Jack L Warner didn’t like black people, he eventually quit America for good, disgusted at the racism he faced every single day. He wrote:

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.

Himes moved to France in the 1950s, and lived among the Bohemian set in Paris. He eventually moved to the south of France, and then to Spain, where he died in 1984.

There were to be eight completed novels featuring Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, and one – Plan B – remained unfinished at Himes’s death. This compendium, from Everyman’s Library, includes A Rage In Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965). The book is beautifully bound and presented, and even has a book-mark ribbon. This is a definite keeper, to be dipped into during the long-haul nights from January through to springtime. For good measure, there’s an introduction by SA Cosby and – this I really did like – a triple chronology of Himes’s life set against other literary events of the time and what was going on in America and the wider world, socially and politically.

The style of the novels is bleakly comic and, at times, very violent. As their nicknames suggest, the Jones and Johnson live with death as a daily companion and they themselves have no compunction about matching force with force when it comes to serious criminality, although they are generally relaxed in the company of petty criminals such as card sharps, whores and lottery spivs. Despite the sharp banter between the pair, Harlem is a pretty grim place most of the time:

This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn’t anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal — always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught.

There was a new Penguin edition of A Rage In Harlem a couple of years ago, and you can read my review of it by clicking this link. The Essential Harlem Detectives is available now.

January 17, 2024 0

LOST AND NEVER FOUND . . . Between the covers

If the tags “Oxford”, “Murder” and “Detective” have you salivating about the prospect of real ale in ancient pubs, choirs rehearsing madrigals in college chapels, and the sleuth nursing a glass of single malt while he listens to Mozart on his stereo system, then you should look away now. Simon Mason (left) brings us an Oxford that is very real, and very now. The homeless shiver on their cardboard sleeping mats in deserted graveyards, and the most startling contrast is the sight of Range Rovers and high-end Volvos cruising into car washes manned by numerous illegal immigrants from God-knows-where, all controlled by criminals, probably embedded within the Albanian mafia.

Against this background, meet Detective Inspector Ryan Wilkins, and his partner DI Ray Wilkins (no relation to Ryan or the late footballer). Ray is from a wealthy Nigerian family, happily married, photogenic and a rising star in the police hierarchy, while Ryan is – to put it bluntly – what some people might call a Chav. His idea of workwear is silver shell-suit bottoms, baseball cap and knock-off Nike hoodie. He is working hard to revive his career after being suspended. His former girlfriend died of a drug overdose, while his son – Ryan junior, – is largely looked after by Wilkins’s sister.

I missed the first novel in the series, but enjoyed the second, The Broken Afternoon, which I reviewed in December last year. Now the unlikely partners are faced with a new mystery. A formerly wealthy heiress, who has frittered away most of her privilege on drugs and a hedonistic lifestyle, has gone missing. Her Rolls Royce is found abandoned after colliding with the gates of the station car park. The tabloids, who have a huge library of back copy on Zoey Fanshawe, sniff a sensation, and they are not wrong. When Ryan finds her body, brutally strangled in an empty Oxford property owned by her former husband, the world and his wife are leaning on him to find the killer.

The concept underpinning this series is the contrast between Ray and Ryan, and that Ryan – the anarchic slob – is the one with the real detective’s brain. He is also unlucky in love. His current girlfriend, ostensibly a flourishing florist, has a dark past. We meet an officer who seems to be everyone’s favourite copper, the charismatic Assistant Chief Constable, Chester Lynch. There isn’t a contemporary box she doesn’t tick. Female?√ Black?√ Media friendly?√ Wears leather and designer shades?√ So far, her career trajectory has not been impeded by awkward bastards like Ryan Wilkins, who has a habit of asking difficult questions. This is all about to change.

While Ray seems mesmerised by Lynch (who has just offered him a serious promotion) Ryan is immune to the hype, and suspects she is a player in the murky back-story of the late Zoe Fanshawe. The plot of Lost and Never Found is beautifully crafted, and the description of the underbelly of Oxford life – the homeless camping in the graveyards of its ancient churches, and the women plying their trade in the derelict garages of its bleak outer suburbs – is a salutary contrast to the “Dreaming Spires” trope. Another part of the spell that Simon Mason casts is the difference between what Ray and Ryan face when they go home at night. Ray is met by his eminently sensible and forbearing wife Diane, while Ryan faces only the wrath of his sister, and the fact that Ryan junior has fallen asleep yet again without a bed-time story from his dad. This book will be published by Riverrun on 18th January.

January 12, 2024 0

THE TEACHER . . . Between the covers

This is a welcome return for Tim Sullivan’s distinctive copper, Detective Sergeant George Cross. Based in Bristol, the series is centred upon this unusual police officer – unusual in that he has a mental condition variously described as Autism, or Aspergers Syndrome. Common symptoms of the condition include lavish attention to detail, the inability to understand figurative speech and an intense reliance on pattern and repetition in personal life. I loved the previous book, The Monk, and you can read what I thought by clicking the link.

Now, in a village not far from Bristol an elderly man has been found dead at the foot of the stairs in his cottage. Alistair Moreton was not well-loved in Crockerne . The former headmaster of a private school was abrupt and aloof – except at parish council meetings when he objected to anything and everything on the agenda, mainly because he could, and because he took pleasure at being a contrarian.

A few years previously, he had been wrongfully implicated in the disappearance of a local schoolgirl, and much damage was done before she presented herself at a London police station, admitting she had just run away from home. Moreton had managed to alienate almost everyone in Crockerne, particularly the London couple – the Cockerells – who had a weekend cottage next to his, and with whom he had engaged in several lengthy – and expensive – legal battles.

Moreton’s son Sandy is an MP whose right-wing views have resulted in his being ‘recalled’ by his constituents, and so he faces a by-election. When George Cross’s temporary boss, DI Bobby Warner makes a premature arrest, and organises a press conference alongside Sandy Moreton, Cross quietly continues his own investigations, troubled by the fact that Alistair Moreton’s ‘set-in-stone’ daily routine had changed significantly over the two weeks prior to his death.

Cross discovers that Moreton’s tenure as headmaster of All Saints was characterised by brutality and a cruel disregard, and that there are many grown men whose childhoods were disfigured by beatings at the school – and the almost universal disbelief of their parents when they were told what was going on. A Facebook group of All Saints ‘survivors’ has been set up, and Cross comes to think that Moreton’s killer may be one of the members.

Along the way we have an intriguing glimpse into Cross’s family life. His father came out as gay later in life, but his partner has died, while Cross’s mother has remarried. A local priest is perhaps the closest thing Cross has to a friend and the cleric – Stephen – acts as an unofficial master of ceremonies in this unusual ménage.

The Crown Prosecution Service have been persuaded to put Barnaby Cotterell on trial for murder, but the case falls apart. Meanwhile disturbing information has come to light about the professional behaviour (or otherwise) of DI Bobby Warner.

Tim Sullivan leads us a merry dance and we whirl through a plethora of potential killers until, with just a few pages to go, we finally learn just who – from a classroom full of suspects – did away with the vicious and sadistic former schoolmaster. George Cross is a remarkable character – resolute, hugely intelligent, baffling to many of his colleagues, but blessed with insights that make him unique among modern fictional coppers. The Teacher is published by Head of Zeus and will be available on 18th January.

January 10, 2024 0