CrimeFile: Vincent Banville on a back-to-back from Fredrick Forsyth and Ian Rankin's lastest Rebus, pus the best of the new releases.
It's seven years since Forsyth wrote his last thriller, one that I felt showed a decline in his formerly high standards. However, Avenger puts him once again back at the top of the tree. Always one to tell a great story, sometimes his penchant for shoving in large amounts of research has tended to slow the impetus of the narrative. But I'd go so far as to say that Avenger approaches the massive readability of his classic, The Day of the Jackal.
Billionaire Canadian industrialist Steven Edmond hires ex-Vietnam special forces and tunnel rat Cal Dexter to avenge the death of his grandson in Bosnia. This triggers a complex plot that involves terrorist and anti-terrorist organisations, and journeys to such diverse locations as war-torn Bosnia in the late 1990s, Vietnam in the 1960s, and the jungles of Central America in the present. As usual, Forsyth's knowledgeability about his subject is evident and, as well as untangling the intricacies of a superbly plotted storyline, he comes up with little off-shoots of information about which Michael Caine might have said "not many people know that". Avenger is a real page-turner by one of the best in the adventure story business.
Another professional and a huge seller, Rankin is the thinking man's thriller writer. His Det Insp John Rebus of the Edinburgh police department is famous enough now simply to be termed Rebus.
At the start of A Question of Blood, we find him in hospital with severely burned hands. The fact that a criminal named Fairstone, who has been stalking Rebus's colleague, Det Sgt Siobhan Clarke, has been burned to death naturally casts suspicion on Rebus. Of course, no one, especially his superiors, believes his story that he scalded his hands with boiling water.
However, this set-up is merely a side-issue to the main plot, which is concerned with the slaying of two 17-year-old students at an exclusive private school in South Queensferry, a suburb of the city. The alleged assassin, a former SAS officer named Herdman, killed himself, but this is an Ian Rankin crime novel, so nothing is as simple as it seems.
Rebus, as usual, gets up everyone's nose in solving the crime, but shows an unexpected mellowness of character near the end, when Clarke's life is threatened. Is he really a big softie after all?
A lot of Irish crime fiction seems suspended in the past, as though the practitioners have been reared on Agatha Christie plots and the prose style of Our Boys or Ireland's Own. This is not necessarily a bad thing in these days of crash, bang, wallop and anything goes, but modern readers, reared on the ultra-explicit, might not rush to buy, End of the Line, a novel that gives us a jolly-old-girl investigative journalist named Emma Boylan and her gung-ho husband, Vinny.
This would be a pity, for K.T. McCaffrey's novel is quite a good revenge tale, with a determined assassin out to wreck vengeance on the people who blighted his, his sister's, and his mother's lives. Based on a true-life incident in the 1940s, when a number of orphans were burned to death in a convent in Cavan town, the book also possibly touches on another event, the death of a priest, near the author's home place of Clara in Co Offaly. The locale here has been shifted to Lonsdale, a suburb of Dublin, and the timeline brought forward to the early 1960s, while the narrative is kick-started by extracts from the diary of one Nelly Joyce. End of the Line deserves a wide readership.
Edmund Power's The Last Chapter is a dark narrative of a man, a would-be writer, attempting to get out from under a ghastly lifestyle by purloining the manuscript of someone else and passing it off as his own. Trapped in poverty and a cold-water flat in Kilmainham, and scalded by an alcoholic wife and autumn leaves of rejection slips, Brendan Stokes inadvertently comes across a novel called Remember Me, Fair Eleanore, the property of his dead neighbour, Andrew Whitty.
Realising that he is in possession of what could turn out to be a bestseller, Stokes pretends that he himself has written it, an event that brings down fire, brimstone and a fate worse than death on his head. Power's melodramatic and heated prose suits the ramifications of his rather gothic story and makes for a reasonably gripping tale.
True Crime by Jake Arnott comes recommended by David Bowie, no less - go on, surely you remember David Bowie! Arnott is one of the newer guys on the fictional crime scene, his two former novels, The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, having met with praise above their station. Set firmly in the recent, well, reasonably recent, London underworld of such as the Krays, these books are the literary equivalent of a film like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, being jokey, full of coincidence, and brutal to the point of yuck, did he really write that?
The plot is concerned with the efforts of one Tony Meehan, journalist and closet psychopath, to ghostwrite the memoirs of various gangsters, recruited by his rabid publisher, Victor Groombridge. I have to admit that the book has a rather macabre fascination, which certainly kept me reading, and guiltily chucking, right to the end.
Finally, just a quick word for Last Tango in Aberystwyth, an impossible-to- synopsise comedy thriller from Malcolm Pryce. I've just finished reading a biography of the dear departed Spike Milligan, and if anyone could emulate his frantic and surreal sense of humour, then Pryce has to be awarded the laurel. Buy it and laugh yourself sick!
Avenger By Fredrick Forsyth Bantan Press £17.99
A Question of Blood By Ian Rankin Orion, £17.99
End of the Line By K.T. McCaffrey The Do-Not Press,£6.99
The Last Chapter By Edmund Power Pocket Books/Townhouse,£6.99
Last Tramp in Aberystwyth By Malcolm Pryce Bloomsbury,£9.99
Addendum: Following dialogue on The Irish Times letters page recently about the authorship of the regular Crimefile column on these pages, its author has decided to abandon the byline Michael Painter, which he has used up to now; a decision he explains as follows:
"It is on record that Graham Greene had difficulty in giving any of his characters names like Brown, White or Black, in case both he and his readers confused them with the author. Many years ago, I wrote a novel about an Irish expatriate teacher named Michael Painter suffering in and barely surviving the Biafran War. As many of his experiences were based on my own sojourn in Nigeria, I lost the run of myself for a long time and couldn't differentiate between him and me.
"However, after myriad sessions with my therapist and the help and consolation of family and friends, I am now cured and can quite unequivocally and categorically state that I am, in fact, the one and only Vincent Banville."