Last month I attended the Creative Writing Thursday event at Harrogate and was amazed at how much I got out of the day, particularly from the session with Stuart MacBride (whose books I have read for some time) and Allan Guthrie (of whom I had a few of his novels but had only read Kill Clock up until that point.
So, after the event, I was compelled to read some of Allan’s books – someone who teaches crime writing and is an agent for other crime writers has got to be doing something right after all.
My only disappointment was that I had waited so long.
Whilst I enjoyed Kill Clock, it was part of the Most Wanted series of short books aimed at reluctant readers (a category I certainly do not fall into) and now, having read more of Allan’s work I can see where he’d clearly had to rein in his usual style for that project.
First I went with ‘Bye Bye Baby’ a downloadable novella based on a short story he’d written some time before. For a bargain price up it popped on my iphone screen with a great cover image too as a Kindle download.
I also grabbed a copy of his latest novel ‘Slammer’ published by Polygon, and proceeded to read them back to back.
‘Bye Bye Baby’ is a great little book and one where I really wasn’t sure where it was going to lead or at which point it was going to tie up the tale of a woman who has lost here little boy and the cops who are trying to help her. To say too much about the plot would spoil things for a reader but it is full of surprises. As an extra, at the end of the novella there is Allan’s original short story, also excellent in its own right and a clear indication of where he used it as a jumping off point for the longer version. In some ways, I wished I’d read the short story first, maybe with a breather of a few days and then read the longer piece – but that might just be me.
‘Slammer’ is the story of Nick Glass, a prison officer who gets himself caught up in the drug dealing and smuggling for some of the inmates and a spiraling world that starts to fall apart around him when threats are made to his family as he becomes more and more embroiled and trapped in the dangerous game he has started to play.
It features some very brutal sequences and Guthrie puts his characters through some high levels of damage – something that he appears to like doing in both books to an extent.
He hurts his characters, characters the reader has strongly connected with, then he pulls back for a short while before delivering more brutal punches in physical, mental and psychological forms. Then, when you think you can risk pausing for breath, when you think you’re there at a likely conclusion, he comes back with his hands reaching out to pull the rug out from underneath his characters and from his readers.
If the sample of Mr Guthrie’s work that I’ve read to date is any indication of the body of work as a whole, then I’ll be seeking out his other novels very soon indeed.
Keith B Walters
No comments:
Post a Comment