psychopath

COGNIZANCE … Between the covers

Guy Portman created a brilliantly psychotic serial killer called Dyson Devereux, and over the three books in the series, Necropolis, Sepultura and Golgotha, Portman took aim at every sacred cow in modern British society. Nothing – and no-one – escaped unscathed, from lavishly tasteless funerals, ‘woke’ human resources officials, earnest (and useless) social workers, gender-identity professionals right through to so-called ‘community leaders’. Devereux was killed off in Golgotha, but in Sepultura we learned that Mr D had fathered a son, Horatio, the mother being a borderline hapless Antiguan lady called Rakesha. In Emergence, we discovered that the teenage Horatio is a case of ‘like father, like son’, as he murders his mum’s boyfriend Brendan, a man he calls Fool’s Gold. The murder was cleverly disguised to make it seem that the unfortunate chap died as a result of a sexual experiment gone wrong.

In Arcadia, Horatio enjoys a brief (but violent) sojourn in Antigua, but Cognizance sees him back in London, and attending a particularly awful high school. Horatio is about to upset some of his classmates in his gang-infested school, but he has a much older enemy, the man he nicknames ‘Rat’. ‘Rat’, properly known as Roland Barstow was best mates with the late Brendan, and is convinced (rightly) that Horatio killed him. ‘Rat’ seems to be around every corner, and waiting at every bus stop, but Horatio manages – for a while – to keep him at arms length.

In school, Horatio makes a serious error when he mocks a very large – and very stupid – fellow pupil. Unfortunately for our hero, this lad is gang-connected, and they take their revenge on Horatio in a rather smelly fashion in the boys’ toilets. Horatio vows revenge, and achieves this after a fashion when two rival gangs have a set-to in a particularly loathsome tower block of flats. Our hero has other worries, though, when he is attacked with a hammer, and left in a life – threatening condition.

Horatio’s sense of humour is suitably disturbed – and disturbing. While at his aunt’s funeral he remembers the fun he had when his mum’s boyfriend was laid to rest:
“When the casket was carried in at the start of Fools Gold’s funeral, the music was supposed to be Never Say Goodbye by Bon Jovi. However, I sneaked into the room where the music system was and changed it. Because everyone thought he had died from auto erotic asphyxiation gone wrong, I chose the theme tune for Top Gun. Take My Breath Away. Fools Gold’s father went beserk, as did Rat. It was hilarious.”

The running joke in the series is that literally no-one (with the exception of Rat) sees Horatio for what he is. He fools everyone else, including his mother, his delightful girlfriend Serena, and his teachers. What to make of a teenage killer, obsessed with algebra and trigonometry, a boy whose favourite book is Bleak House, and someone who, as his aunt lies dying of cancer, imagines her in hell, perishing in the flames, suffering the torments of Tantalus as a family size bag of Maltesers is dangled just in front of her, but forever out of reach?

What Guy Portman does is to merge merge domestic disaster with caustic comedy, and he turns our normal, family-orientated sense of decency on its head, and has us cheering for the devious Horatio. The more malign his misdeeds, the more we laugh. Of course, this book will not appeal to everyone, but for those of us with a dark sense of humour it is pure gold. Lovers of dystopian comedy, this is for you – I dare you not to laugh. Cognizance is published by Pugnacious Publishing and is available now.

July 21, 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

THE GENIUS KILLER . . . Between the covers

The central character of this novel is Karl Jackson. He has survived a brutal upbringing punctuated with savage beatings by his drunken father, and sexual abuse from his uncle Charlie. Karl has a twin, Nathan, but he never faced the same storm of violent rage. Karl Jackson is described in the cover blurb as a sociopath. I am no psychologist, but Jackson’s steady job as a chemistry teacher and his scrupulous and well-planned crimes make me think he is more psychopathic, but it does not matter. He is a genuinely awful human being. His spree of undetected killings started in his childhood when, merely for the fun of it, he pushed a young boy – fishing in the lake where they played – down into the water, and then watched with amusement as the lad struggled, choked, and then bobbed about on the surface as lifeless as the float attached to his fishing line.

Jackson’s genius (hence the title of the book) is to organise killings in such a way that no possible evidence can link the deaths to him. While Jackson was working as a student in Australia, one of his murders involved the ingenious combination of a sleeping bag, a sedative injection and a deadly Brown Snake on a hiking trail in the Blue Mountain region of New South Wales. Jackson exacts an elaborate – and some may say justified – revenge on his father by causing the old man’s death in hospital with a very clever use of cyanide and the sharpened end of a coat hanger.

The background to this novel is the atmospheric landscape of the English Lake District, where Jackson carries out another long delayed act of retribution on his abusive uncle Charlie by faking an accidental climbing death. When Charlie is found dead at the bottom of a solo climb, his head shattered like a melon hit with a hammer, no one believes it is anything other than an unfortunate error of judgement.

Thus far, Jackson has been clever enough to avoid any attention from the police but, inevitably, he meets his nemesis. Theodore “Tex” Deacon is a late career – but distinguished – detective slowly recovering from the trauma caused by the protracted death of his wife. As is the way with institutions these days, he is temporarily sidelined and identified as a vulnerable person in need of psychological help and treatment by the ubiquitous counselling profession. However, his many successes in tracking down murderers brings him to the attention of Debbie Pilkington, an ambitious young reporter with a local Lakeland newspaper. She alerts him to the many coincidences surrounding deaths in the Jackson family, and so he goes off piste to investigate the case.

Black humour is never very far away in this book, despite the body count. Here, Karl Jackson describes the man who is having an affair with his wife.

“Richard Turkington’s graying Beatle cut had a bald spot on top giving him the appearance of a rock star monk. A fleshy roll wobbled over the top of his chinos. Turkington had clearly ignored warning signs of middle age and had lived a pudgy existence preferring a world of pints and puddings. Quite a contrast to the sleek wire framed fell runners surrounded by them at a function like this. Richard looked like Mr Blobby.”

The Genius Killer rattles along at great pace and is sometimes darkly comic, but in Jackson, the author has created a genuine larger-than-life monster. The book ends rather enigmatically, but as it is described as No.1 in the Tex Deacon series, I suspect the Cumbrian copper will be back soon with another case. Mark Robson is a sports journalist and this is his debut novel. It is published by Orla Kelly Publishing and available now.

July 14, 2023 0

GONE . . . Between the covers

In Gone, Leona Deakin’s debut thriller, we meet Dr Augusta Bloom, a psychologist, and her business partner Marcus Jameson. They have established an investigation agency which offers the selling points of Bloom’s skills in understanding the human psyche and Jameson’s rather darker arts, developed during his time working for a shadowy government intelligence unit. The business is doing making headway, but not so much so that Bloom doesn’t ask questions when Jameson asks her to work pro bono on a family-related issue.

Jameson’s sister Claire has, for some time, fulfilled a mixed role of aunt, mother and babysitter to a teenage girl called Jane. Jane’s mother Lana, is a single mum, loving but chaotic, perhaps suffering from PTSD after several tours in conflict zones when she was a soldier in the army. Now she has disappeared, leaving Jane with no money for food or rent. Knowing of her mum’s fragile mental state. Jane was not initially alarmed, but when she began to investigate, after receiving no help from the police, she made several disturbing discoveries.  Lana disappeared on her birthday. Immediately before her disappearance she had received a mysterious card inviting her to play a game. The beautifully presented card bore the words, elegantly embossed in silver on cream:

“Happy first birthday. 
Your gift is the game.
Dare to play?”

Jane has discovered, via the internet, that her mum is not the only person to have vanished from the face of the earth, having been sent the same invitation. Dismissed by the police, her only way forward is to ask for expert help.

Bloom’s initial reluctance to become involved softens, as she remembers two daunting experiences with psychopaths in her own recent history. One ended tragically, but the other – involving a clever and manipulative teenager called Seraphine – has remained lodged in her memory for different reasons.

Leona Deakin’s own experience and training in psychology gives this novel a framework of authenticity to which the more fanciful parts of the narrative can cling. It soon becomes clear to the reader that Deakin has presented a neat and convincing conjuring trick: the missing are no longer the victims – they are the ones to be feared; those left behind have become the prey.   The relationship between Bloom and Jameson is intriguing. It reminded me of the unresolved tension and undeclared love between Val McDermid’s doomed lovers Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. We are left to decide for ourselves what Augusta Bloom looks like; Deakin (right) suggests that she might be rather dowdy, an academic in flat shoes. She is certainly razor sharp mentally, however, and she plays a devastating human chess game with the organisation behind the birthday card disappearances.

Gone is published by Black Swan, part of the Penguin group. It came out as a Kindle in August this year, and will be available as a paperback on 12th December.  