Customer Reviews

Graveyard Shift, The

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a reprint of a novel first published in 1965, but the setting seems to be slightly earlier. A pound sterling was worth considerably more than now. The story covers a one-day period and is a little too compressed in time.

The story introduces Nick Miller, a police sergeant with independent financial means. The case concerns Ben Garvald, just released from serving a sentence for a payroll robbery. There are people who don't want Ben to come home, including his ex-wife and her sister. The search for Ben results in a large amount of collateral damage as various characters seem to trip over their own feet.

Some of the plot does not seem very realistic, perhaps because monetary amounts seemed too low for the related actions, or perhaps because there is too much action in too short a time period. It is an OK read, but not one of the best mysteries among novels recently published.

This was not Jack Higgins finest hour. I have read better. The ending was the only good thing about the book. Look for other Jack Higgins novels.

This was the first book of Jack Higgins I have ever had the pleasure to read. I spent the evening reading it and finished it in three hours.
The plot was well paced and the characters interesting, a fine book and a good read.

While this is certainly not the Higgins many of us expect in his present day writings, it is still a very nice piece of work. Those who pick this book up, expecting an Eagle Has Landed or The President's Daughter, will be disappointed. This book pre-dates much of Higgins' work, but it does offer us insight into how he crafted his tales.

We see him ply the descriptions that we have to come to expect and his characters all have nuances that make them almost real. At times you can hear them talking to you. The story takes place essentially within the span of 12 hours, covering the Graveyard Shift of the Central Division of the London police. A newly assigned Sargeant is called into duty a few days early, due to a lack of personnel and a flu bug making the rounds.

His task is simple enough. Find a recently released felon and inform him that he should not go near his ex-wife, who has remarried. But the felon is intent on seeing her, and as Sargeant looks for him, the underworld of London's nightlife becomes the focus of the story. When the felon turns up dead, the Sargeant begins to put the pieces together, and the perpetrator is caught.

This is a quick read that is hard to put down, as many of Higgins' books are. It's a great book to use to introduce Higgins to a new reader. This book will remain on my shelves for years to come, and I have placed in the local public libraries here as well.

Adding to my Jack Higgins "Sean Dillon" series. Book arrived within the alloted time frame and was well packaged.

Sadly, I must report my disappointment in Jack Higgins' THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT. Many details that the author must have felt important were unnecessarily repeated throughout, where I would have liked to see more character and plot development. Instead, I felt as though I was following Sergeant Nick Miller around on his 8 hour overnight shift, searching for a guy who was recently released from prison. And when I say following for 8 hours, it felt like minute to minute. Others do like his style, but it just wasn't the style for me.

[...]

Ben Garvald, newly released from nine long years in stir, is back in town to claim what is rightfully his. That doesn't bode well for his ex-wife Bella, now married to one of the wealthiest men around. You see, Ben is not your garden variety criminal. He's a former Marine Commando, highly resourceful and used to getting what he wants.
But Ben may have met his match in Sergeant Nick Miller, one of a new breed of police detective. Multi-talented, supremely confident and every bit as determined as his newfound adversary, the rugged Mr. Garvald.

Fast paced and action packed, The Graveyard Shift by Jack Higgins is a fine example of 1960s pulp fiction British style. Most of the quick moving narrative takes place over the course of a single rain drenched night, giving the proceedings an undeniably noirish quality. As Garvald and Miller cover much the same territory, Higgins cleverly alternates the perspective of the third person narration from one to the other. This technique has the effect of keeping the reader on his or her toes while contributing greatly to the book's overall suspense quotient. Highly recommended to hardboiled crime fans.

I don't know why I bothered finishing this book rather than dropping it halfway through. The characters were caricatures, the plot was not interesting, and there really was only one surprise at all in the book, which was at the very end and did little to enliven an otherwise dull, predictable story.

Given the number of books that Mr. Higgins has sold, I sincerely hope that his writing has improved over time. In this book he uses the same words and phrases over and over. As an example, he describes (in the first sentence!) a small door within a larger door as a "Judas gate", which I suppose is an appropriate, if not very common, term. Several different characters, from very different strata of life (policeman, businessman, thug) and society also then refer to "a Judas gate". I have heard this phrase maybe 2 or 3 times over the last several years, but here we have it every 50 pages or so.

As another example when we are first introduced to one character she is described by the narrator as "Irish-looking, dark hair razor-cut to the skull..." and then when the main character meets her a hundred pages later, his impression is "The dark hair, razor-cut to the skull, gave her a rather boyish appearance and the sallow, Irish peasant face..." Come on, when an author consults his notes on character description can't he at least have a thesaurus handy?

In terms of plot it appeared that this book was written "on the fly" with no forethought and the author just walked forward from scene to scene without any overall scheme of what was going to happen. Although there is a fair amount of "action", it has essentially nothing to capture ones attention intellectually and keep it.

Do yourself a favor and read something else.

While this is certainly not the Higgins many of us expect in his present day writings, it is still a very nice piece of work. Those who pick this book up, expecting an Eagle Has Landed or The President's Daughter, will be disappointed. This book pre-dates much of Higgins' work, but it does offer us insight into how he crafted his tales.

We see him ply the descriptions that we have to come to expect and his characters all have nuances that make them almost real. At times you can hear them talking to you. The story takes place essentially within the span of 12 hours, covering the Graveyard Shift of the Central Division of the London police. A newly assigned Sargeant is called into duty a few days early, due to a lack of personnel and a flu bug making the rounds.

His task is simple enough. Find a recently released felon and inform him that he should not go near his ex-wife, who has remarried. But the felon is intent on seeing her, and as Sargeant looks for him, the underworld of London's nightlife becomes the focus of the story. When the felon turns up dead, the Sargeant begins to put the pieces together, and the perpetrator is caught.

This is a quick read that is hard to put down, as many of Higgins' books are. It's a great book to use to introduce Higgins to a new reader. This book will remain on my shelves for years to come, and I have placed in the local public libraries here as well.