Big Killing [Hardcover]

Robert Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2003

Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in steamy West Africa, smells trouble immediately when he is approached by a porn merchant to deliver a video at a secret rendezvous. This is the second novel featuring Bruce Medway.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Even though it was published in the U.K. in 1996, Wilson's second Bruce Medway West African mystery seems particularly timely: at the start, Medway sits in a bar in the Ivory Coast and reads the latest details of a rebel-led war in neighboring Liberia. Those rebels have something to do with a series of murders, beatings, robberies and other assorted acts of mayhem that dog the resilient, alcohol-soaked Englishman as he tries to stay alive. "I do jobs for people who don't want to do the jobs themselves," Medway explains to a very large porno dealer, Fat Paul, who hires him to deliver a video and soon becomes one of the many violated corpses in Bruce's wake. Best known for his Gold Dagger-winning A Small Death in Lisbon, Wilson writes concisely but poetically about a callously brutal side of African life that might shock readers lulled by the sweetness of Alexander McCall Smith's stories about Botswana. But Medway's bloody misadventures, as he tries to protect a pampered diamond dealer from having his stones and his body parts ripped off by corrupt police and other villains, ring with a dark, sad credibility of their own. And Wilson also pulls off the surprising feat of making us see just what it is about life in West Africa that keeps Medway from giving it up to return to England or to follow his lost lover to Berlin.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Booklist

In the second Bruce Medway book, after Instruments of Darkness (2003), the boozing big guy is broke, bored, and killing time in Ivory Coast, awaiting an errand from the millionaire who holds his marker. There's civil war in neighboring Liberia, and locally someone is killing people and gutting them with metal claws. Before you can say "the plot thickens," Medway has three jobs: delivering a mysterious videotape, baby-sitting a young diamond trader, and checking up on a missing plantation manager. That everything is related won't come as a surprise, although the manner in which things come together is nearly impossible to predict (mystery lovers lacking stellar powers of concentration may find themselves paging back from time to time to sort it all out). Wilson has chosen a natural setting for his very dark noir and peopled it well, with weary heroes, damaged dames, and slimy lowlifes who employ an excellent hard-boiled parlance. Unfortunately, there's so much of everything--plot, characters, twists, death, and gore--these gifts become a little bit of a burden. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: San Val (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417706260
• ISBN-13: 978-1417706266
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

More About the Author

ROBERT WILSON is the author of nine previous novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A take-no-prisoners adventure, November 1, 2003

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Killing (Bruce Medway Mysteries, No. 2) (Paperback)

Edgy and brutal, Wilson's The Big Killing is a wild ride through the lawless territory of West Africa, where greed rules and bodies lie trampled in its wake like so much fertilizer. If possible, the Dark Continent has become even darker, as portrayed by Wilson, while the lush natural bounty and untapped resources are attacked by raptors with the power to plunder and destroy with impunity.

Diamonds are the source of intrigue, theft and murder, providing profit that allows the importation of weapons in an ongoing battle for tribal ascendance. There is a longstanding system of mass murder by one so-called "legitimate" government after another, backed by various interests to assert control over an area too rich to escape notice. The cost in lives hardly matters to these players, because this population is expendable and self-perpetuating. Scores of bodies accrue, a testament of man's inhumanity to man, the numbers so outrageous that they beg believability. Still the violence continues unabated.

Bruce Medway makes his living as a fixer, a man willing to do "bits of business, management, organization, negotiations, transactions and debt collection". He won't involve himself in anything criminal or domestic, finding such things too quickly out of control. When a stranger asks Medway to do a quick job, a drop, it will spell the end of Bruce's financial woes and allow him to pay off his current debt. Either from stubbornness or hubris, Medway agrees to get involved, even though his intuition is screaming a warning against this venture. This one bad decision begets a series of confrontations that are ever more complicated and violent, where one intention obscures another and things grow more dangerous by the hour. The bodies pile up as quickly as the introduction of nefarious characters with hidden agendas, while Medway hops from one brush with death to another, never quite able to catch his breath. His small islands of respite are the nightmare-riddled dreams of alcohol-induced sleep.

Wilson is a master craftsman, a talented storyteller who reads like Robert Stone, combining radical themes, blending a seamless plot that doesn't compromise or disappoint. From the decadent porn purveyors to diamond smugglers, arms merchants to corrupt police officials, Wilson creates a range of characters from thin air, sending them spiraling into the killing fields of a war-torn and criminalized Africa.

Against this dramatic and violent background, Wilson writes with a moral clarity of the intense struggle of a continent made dark by the interminable abuses of exploiters. This is political-mystery/fiction at its most powerful, pointing the reader toward awareness of the brutal reality that is Africa today, the indiscriminate use of power, the pillaging of natural resources and the political ascendancy of particular agendas. Once you start, be prepared to keep reading to the final pages. I did and when I was finished, Wilson gained another enthusiastic fan. Luan Gaines/ 2003.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Setting, and a Talent for Misdirection Serves this Book Well, July 30, 2005

By 

Ian Fowler (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Killing (Bruce Medway Mysteries, No. 2) (Paperback)

"The Big Killing" is my first Robert Wilson book. It is the second in his series of mysteries featuring Bruce Medway, British expatriate living in the Ivory Coast. Since it was in the bargain book section, I went ahead and picked up the third and fourth books. However, I'm not so sure if that was a bit of a hasty decision in the end.

When we first meet Medway, he's a bit of a mess. Evidently, the events of the first book, "Instruments of Darkness" (which I have not read) have left him a disillusioned (although I doubt that he was ever "illusioned"), adrift in the Ivory Coast, broke, pining for his lost love, and waiting for his Syrian millionaire patron to give him something to do. In the meantime, the Liberian Civil War is raging, with one of its apparent casualties begin the Liberian VP, found with his innards ripped out by a killer simply dubbed "The Leopard".

Naturally, as is the case in such novels, Medway finds he has three jobs all at once. His Syrian millionaire friend wants him to check on the manager of his sheanut plantation. An old friend from England asks Medway to chaperone a young diamond merchant. And a repugnant pornographer asks Medway to deliver a package. These diverse plot-threads soon converge in a political tangle, as Medway maneuvers his way through the thoroughly corrupt world of West Africa.

The plot is quite brisk, if convoluted. Medway stumbles into ambushes, tangles with corrupt village police, dodges a massive kidnapping plot, all while the bodies pile up around him. Numerous characters enter the stage, although only a few actually seem to have any bearing on the overall novel. Wilson is very good at playing with the reader's perceptions and stereotypes, as some characters who seem as if they're going to be critical to the overall plot wind-up dead within a few pages of their introduction. Other characters who seem as if they are merely in the novel to provide background color actually prove extraordinarily relevant. This talent for misdirection serves Wilson well, as he keeps the reader enticed by the enigma of his novel as we try to figure what's going on with Medway.

It's fortunate that this novel is so plot-driven, because Medway is not a terribly strong character. While drawn from the writings of old school hard-boiled fiction, Medway feels as if he's lacking something. He never quite appears to be the moral White Knight Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe is. Nor is ever the self-righteous tough guy who is willing to bloody his hands for justice like Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. While he seems an okay guy, Medway seems to simply be going through the motions, playing tough-guy detective, tangling with cops, killers, and dames. While that's part of Wilson's intent early on, he never really gives Medway anything to strive for, beyond simple survival. Medway never really seems to care about the various people dying around him, but he seeks justice for them nonetheless. His code is perhaps too fuzzy to understand, and that might have been Wilson's goal, but Wilson did the character no favors by not letting him grow within the course of the book.

The real draw of this book (and I suspect the whole series) is the setting. West Africa is no paradise, and Wilson shows us this. It's corrupt and violent, with miles of distance between the haves and the have-nots. Despite the fact that it has been decades since the region has been under direct European Imperial rule, one of the central issues, Wilson reminds us, is that the Europeans never left. They come back, fulfill their own interests (be it diamonds, be it political instability), and then leave while West Africa is force to pick up the pieces. Moreover, Wilson also makes it clear that this situation exists because native born African elites benefit by it. But even more basically, Wilson evokes a place that is hot, humid, and depressed. Wilson's efforts to instill a sense of indignation in his reader is a success.

On the whole, I did like "The Big Killing," although not as much as I expected to when I flipped through it. That's a little unfair on my part, I suppose. Hopefully, with more realistic expectations, I can enjoy the rest of the Medway series.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars solid crime novel, November 26, 2006

By 

Terry Oreilly (San Mateo, Ca.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Killing (Bruce Medway Mysteries, No. 2) (Paperback)

Wilson seems happier with his West African locales than he does with Spain, where his novels get bogged down in scenery and slow paced character development. This novel moves with punch and direction, steering the reader through unusual locations, a post-colonial world of ruthless energy, sinking back into tribalism. well worth reading although it helps to start with the first novel and work up to this one.