Book Review: You Were Never Really Here (Jonathan Ames, 2013)

A one-sitting wallop of a novella by Jonathan Ames.

You Were Never Really Here is a breathless, noirish revenge thriller which reads like a distillation of Raymond Chandler and Lee Child. Rain, blood, broken bones, and despair, in less than a hundred pages!

The main character Joe is a middle-aged man with extreme psychological scars. He was horrifically beaten as a child by his father, and then went on to see appalling things both while serving as a Marine in the First Gulf War and then while working on an FBI anti-sex-trafficking task force. After a mental breakdown led him to go completely off the grid for a few years, he is now an untraceable independent contractor, hired out via a middle-man to break girls out of the sex trade. On these jobs he tends to favour his father’s domestic weapon of choice – a hammer.

His latest assignment is to rescue the thirteen-year-old daughter of a New York State Senator from a high-end Manhattan brothel. It seems straightforward but complications quickly rear their ugly heads.

As you can maybe tell, this is a bleak and nasty read, but it’s also fantastically gripping. Ames is a skilled writer who gets Joe’s pain and suicidal self-loathing across so well with very few words, as well as the seedy damp greyness of New York City. The violence is kinetic, staccato and wince-inducing. As mentioned above, the off-the-grid loner trope calls to mind Lee Child’s Jack Reacher – though Ames’s prose is better than Child’s – and the PI sleaze aspect is Chandler with a modern polish.

My one criticism is that I do wish it was either a bit longer or had a more conclusive ending, as it finishes on a rather frustrating cliffhanger. Perhaps Joe will return?

Apparently a film version starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Lynne Ramsay (both of whom I love) is due to be released next year, and I’m excited to see whether it can equal the white-knuckle pace and energy of the book. I’ll also look forward to checking out the other titles in this superb new Pushkin Vertigo crime imprint.

Edition:

Pushkin Vertigo | 2016 | 96p | Paperback | Buy here

Film Review: A Hijacking (2012)

A lean Danish Captain Phillips – tense, claustrophobic, and shorn of Hollywood bombast.

A Hijacking, directed by top Danish director Tobias Lindholm, was released in the same year as the Tom Hanks blockbuster Captain Phillips, and essentially covers the same ground – the capture of a civilian tanker by Somalian pirates. But its approach to the subject is very different.

The film begins with the hijacking of the cargo ship MV Rozen somewhere in the Indian Ocean. It then follows the ordeal of ship’s cook Mikkel (played by Pilou Asbæk of Borgen and Game of Thrones fame) as he and the rest of the crew spend the ensuing months trying to survive on board in appalling conditions. But Mikkel is not the sole focus – the other half of the story depicts the shipping company negotiators, led by CEO Peter Ludvigsen, as they sit around dingy conference rooms in Copenhagen and figure out how best to get their crew home.

A Hijacking is not an action film. There are no adrenaline-filled chases or shootouts – in fact, I don’t think a gun is once fired on screen. Instead the film’s thrills come from a sense of sweaty, suffocating tension, steadily ratcheted up as the crew struggle to keep their sanity, the pirates become increasingly desperate, and the negotiators hit impasse after impasse. An impressive amount of drama is wrung from phone calls, and even faxes, between the two sides.

The performances are excellent. The very talented Pilou Asbæk is cropping up all over the place at the moment, and with good reason. Ludvigsen is played by Søren Malling, an actor you’ll know if you’ve watched any Danish TV (he played Jan Meyer in The Killing and Torben Friis in Borgen). Malling is fabulous here as the calmly professional company CEO, who battles to keep his personal emotions out of the negotiations and to suppress his guilt. As with Captain Phillips, the pirates themselves were cast from among Somalian locals and are all non-professional actors, which heightens the film’s authenticity and accentuates the cultural and linguistic gulf between the hijackers and the Danes.

A Hijacking is a sinewy, stripped-back nailbiter that is all the more enjoyable for being an effective alternative to the usual Hollywood fare.

Directed by: Tobias Lindholm, 2012

Book Review: A Spy by Nature (Charles Cumming, 2001)

Charles Cumming’s debut spy novel is a compelling slow-burner.

If you have a look at spy thrillers in a bookshop, something that most of them have in common is a front-cover quote describing them as ‘the new Le Carré’ or ‘the American Le Carré’ or ‘reminiscent of Le Carré’. Of course only a few writers from amongst this smorgasbord of Le Carrés are truly worthy of the comparison – and Charles Cumming is leading the pack.

A Spy by Nature is Cumming’s first novel, written back in 2001. Since those early days he’s become perhaps the best-known of the modern British spy authors, and his most recent two books, A Foreign Country and A Colder War, have been very successful. I could tell while reading this first effort that it was his debut, as there are a few flaws here and there, but it’s still an absorbing read and worth checking out.

It’s the first of two novels Cumming wrote from the perspective of his antiheroic and semi-autobiographical character Alec Milius, a clever but arrogant young man with a natural instinct for secrecy and deception. A Spy by Nature begins with Milius attending an interview at the Foreign Office, then realising that he’s in fact being screened for potential recruitment into MI6.

The ensuing chunk of the book describes the gruelling recruitment process in exhaustive detail, for at least the first 100 pages. It’s interesting – and presumably accurate, since Cumming himself underwent the process when he was younger – but it does go on for too long, and could have been edited down.

After that the story gets going properly, with Milius working undercover at a British oil company. His goal is to befriend two covert CIA agents working at a rival American firm, and then to feed them false information. As the plot slowly unspools, Milius begins to buckle under the weight of the lies and the isolation.

I find modern corporate espionage very exciting to read about. It feels realistic and relevant, and it’s all the more frightening for that. Cumming’s style is intelligent but also taut and easy to read, so despite the length of A Spy by Nature I sped through it.

It’s not an action-packed ripsnorter of a thriller – not shoot-outs or car chases – but more of a cerebral and believable one, with well-drawn interesting characters. That’s why the comparison with Le Carré actually makes sense in this instance.

It’s a tense and gripping read – just don’t get let the problematic beginning bit put you off.

Edition:

HarperCollins | 2012 | 432p | Paperback | Buy here

Book Review: Valdez is Coming (Elmore Leonard, 1970)

A taut Western from genre king Elmore Leonard.

I’ve just got back from a lovely holiday in Greece, during which I did a fair bit of poolside reading, and Valdez is Coming was one of several books I sped through.

Elmore Leonard, who sadly died last summer, was a prolific master of gritty contemporary crime fiction, but he cut his teeth penning Westerns like this sinewy beauty.

It’s the straight-forward story of a part-time town constable, Bob Valdez, a laid-back nice guy with a hidden background as an Apache tracker for the army. In the opening pages Valdez is drawn into a face-off between an innocent local man and an infamous mercenary gunrunner, Frank Tanner. In the aftermath of this encounter, Valdez sets out to persuade Tanner to pay reparations to the local man’s widow. This in turn leads to a growing spiral of violence, causing Valdez to embrace his brutal past in order to see justice done.

It’s a gripping story. Leonard’s style was so perfectly pared down and readable even early in his career, with not a single word wasted. Valdez and Tanner are a classic Western hero / villain combo in a lot of ways – Valdez reminded me a bit of Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon. But the book avoids predictability with an unexpected ending and an different slant on the typical love story. And there are other well-drawn characters to keep you interested, including the malicious hoodlum R.L. Davis and Tanner’s clever and likeable second-in-command.

This a shot of pure Wild West pleasure, and you instantly know you’re in the hands of an expert storyteller, with a galloping thrill-ride across the mesa lying before you. Highly recommended for fans of the genre.

Edition:

Orion | 2005 | 200p | Paperback | Buy here