Thriller: Fans of John Creed's The Sirius Crossing probably won't be too disappointed with his latest effort The Day of the Dead, but it is certainly not for everyone says Ian Sansom.
At one point in The Day of the Dead, the ever-resourceful Jack Valentine buys a handful of Benzedrex nasal inhalers, rips out the tissue paper, tears the paper up, eats all the little pieces, and washes them down with a drink of milk and whiskey. He then jumps back on his stolen motorbike, a Kawasaki Z900, and heads off, "speeding on amphetamine and subject to a worrying sense of invulnerability and a feeling that this time I wasn't going home until I had finished the thing". Readers of the book may experience a similar feeling.
Fans of The Sirius Crossing, Creed's first thriller, will recall that Jack Valentine is the mild-mannered, gun-toting, ex-covert operations Scotsman who knows his Pollocks from his Hoppers, who has read widely in world literature, and who likes nothing better after a day of murdering evil people than to relax with a nice bottle of wine and a lovely lady. His fellow-adventurers, as previously, are Liam Mellows and Liam's sister, the delectable Deirdre. Liam is a former IRA man. Deirdre now works for the UNHCR. Jack is ex-MRU. John Creed is a.k.a Eoin McNamee.
In The Day of the Dead, Jack is asked by his old friend Paolo Casagrande to bring back his daughter Alva, who is living in New York with a Mexican drug baron and collector of fine art.
And with that we're off. New York. Mexico. Pistol-packing former revolutionaries. Puerto-Rican cocaine dealers called Jesus. Vietnam vets. Art dealers. Shamen. Car chases. Burning rivers. Ancient temples and pyramids. And plenty of descriptions of kit: guns, cars, motorbikes, bombs, helicopters.
If you like this sort of thing, you'll admire John Creed. If you like Eoin McNamee you'll admire his cheek. Jack Valentine is capable of taking a man out with his bare hands, but he is also capable of musing thus: "William Burroughs maintained that heroin altered the molecular structure of the body and people thought it a writer's fancy, although science is now beginning to suggest he might have had a point". He wants to go to Mexico to murder the evil drug-baron: he also wants to see Frida Kahlo's house. When he has the inevitable twist explained to him, he says, "To be honest, the whole thing seems too torturous to be credible." Fair play to the big fella.
Ian Sansom's last book, The Truth About Babies, is published by Granta
The Day of the Dead. By John Creed. Faber & Faber. 246pp. £10.99