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Hard Man

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Pearce has a reputation as a hard man with good reason. Living in Portobello, Edinburgh's seaside town, Pearce is inclined to keep to himself since the violent death of his mother soon after that of his sister. After doing ten years for killing the junkie responsible for his sister's death, Pearce's only companion is Hilda, a male three-legged Dandie Dinmont named after the hard man's mother. With only the occasional conversation with his deceased mum, Pearce is adjusting nicely to his new home when he is accosted by Flash and Rog Baxter, whose plan is to intimidate him into accepting a job. Wrong. Pearce turns the tables on the brothers, reducing them to sniveling pulp by the time their father, Jacob, arrives.

Jacob puts the deal to Pearce. The Baxter's want him to protect sixteen-year-old May from her husband, Wallace, who kicked her out when he found out she was pregnant with another man's child. Pearce's first instinct is to refuse in spite of the money, considering the Baxter's riotously dysfunctional manner of conducting business, but when Hilda is done in by Wallace ("Said the dog dropped like a stone when he hit the water."), Pearce takes it very personally, prepared to bring down May's martial arts-trained husband. Carefully planning his assault on the man who took Hilda, Pearce goes into action. Unfortunately, Wallace is more than a match and Pearce is soon in dire straights with an adversary every bit as tough.

What begins as combat between Pearce and Wallace escalates into a wild melee of unpredictable violence and mayhem, guns blasting, tires screeching and the blade of a knife slicing home. Guthrie provides a wild ride that involves the Baxter family, Pearce Wallace and a guy named Jesus in a blood-soaked, frequently acerbic, tortured imbroglio that is an unpredictable page-turner. The novel speaks for itself, a hard man up against an indifferent world with nothing to lose but the three-legged dog that is his best friend. Using the harsh dialog of the streets, Hard Man pulls no punches, yet manages to humanize a most bizarre assortment of buffoons and loners, loonies and losers, Pearce left wondering what strange trick of fate has landed him in this predicament, a joyride from start to finish. Luan Gaines/2007.

If you like your crime fiction unrepentantly dark, you should try Allan Guthrie, the fastest-rising name in the Scottish subgenre affectionately known as "tartan noir." Hopefully you've already read his explosive debut Two-Way Split (from great indie crime publisher PointBlank Press, which Guthrie later joined as editor) or his multi-award-nominated second novel Kiss Her Goodbye (from the amazing Hard Case Crime). Both take place within the same circle of society in Edinburgh, but follow different protagonists' stories.

In the UK, calling someone a hard man is akin to calling them a tough guy in the US ("Come on, hard man, show me what you've got," for example), and Hard Man, Guthrie's third novel and his first appearance in hardcover, is a direct follow-up to Two-Way Split. In that novel, we met Gordon Pearce, the "hero" (if you will) of the book -- which merely means he was one of the least despicable characters -- who went to prison because of his alternate use for a screwdriver in revenge for his sister's death. Soon after his release, his mother was killed and he sought revenge for that, too.

Now, just a few months later, Jacob Baxter and his sons Roger and Flash have sought Pearce out to help with their own family problems (he comes highly recommended by Jacob's nephew Cooper, a familiar name in this neighborhood). Their sister, sixteen-year-old May, cheated on her husband Wallace with another man and got pregnant. Wallace subsequently threw her out, but has been unable to leave her alone since, leading the Baxters to believe both she and the unborn baby are in danger (nothing near the danger the other fellow is in, but still...).

They want Pearce to protect her, but Pearce refuses to take the job, so the Baxters decide to force his hand. What nobody told them was that you never mess with another man's dog, especially not one he has named after his dead mother.

Despite a lot of really great scenes (including a crucifixion that goes on for pages!), Hard Man was a mild disappointment. It lacked the pure readability of Guthrie's previous work, and the humor felt forced in the beginning. Also, the story started off slow. Guthrie's characters (especially Pearce) think things through a good deal before they act, and these character digressions add depth, but they also drag down the pace. A crime novel needs to keep its pace swift.

Unfortunately, Hard Man also lacks any compelling characters that might have made up for this. Guthrie has created a succession of types with a few quirks to set them apart, but no one ever really jumps off the page, since they're primarily there to further the plot. This dearth of any interesting personalities made the book a struggle to finish: simply put, I couldn't bring myself to care what happened to anyone with the exception of Hilda the dog. I think the main problem is, despite all the thinking they do, everyone makes such stupid decisions that I had to roll my eyes (another hindrance to reading) as they committed blunder after blunder.

Even Pearce seemed to lack the basic intelligence necessary for him to have developed his stellar reputation. A single conversation would have cleared up any misunderstandings nicely and avoided the frustration and duress he experiences. If he didn't have the same name, I would not have guessed this was the same fellow who was such an engaging feature of Two-Way Split.

On the plus side, Guthrie's storytelling skill continues to improve. Once the action begins in full, it does not let up, and Guthrie certainly knows how to express intense pain on the page (something that is usually lacking even in horror novels). The humor is incorporated much more smoothly as the story progresses, and his plot shows cleverness and originality and is generally what kept me reading even through the down spots; I wondered what he would come up with next. I still wonder what he will come up with next because, despite my criticisms of Hard Man, Allan Guthrie remains one of the better crime writers working today, and I have no doubt that he will impress me once again.

I first discovered Allan's work a bit over a year ago and quickly tracked down everything I could find. I read (or re-read) one every few months so as to not run out before the next book/novella is published. Hard Man is my most recent read of Allan's and it didn't disappoint. If you like tight, lean prose and excellent dialogue, Allan's work is right up your alley. And if you enjoy gritty violence mixed with an acerbic wit and black comedy, give Hard Man a read. I also highly recommend Slammer, which was on my 2010 top 10 list of best reads.

This is the critical question for the Baxter men as they seek to protect May, their daughter and sister, from her husband, Wallace. Their answer: to try to involve Pearce, a local hard man (tough guy).

This is an action-filled novel: peopled with dysfunctional individuals. This is not a novel that requires (or even invites) detailed analysis. The equation is simple: stupid people doing stupid things. But doing them in a way that has you wondering how far they will go and what the outcomes might be.

This novel is full of gratuitous violence, moronic behaviour and with a deep undercurrent of black humour. The most likeable character, for me, was Pearce's three-legged (male) dog, Hilda.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

HARD MAN is about as good as modern crime novels get. It's got twists, shocks, blood, and plenty of anti-heroes for you to root for, curse at, and generally become enthralled with. This is a frantic, fast-paced, cynical, hardcore story that combines a lean, powerful prose with a full-ahead no-nonsense plot. If you like damaged, self-examining, sensitive PIs, look away--HARD MAN offers you a roughly-hewn protagonist and honest brutality.

Allan Guthrie's third novel is tight, fast, and raw. Hard Man is, to put it bluntly, a book about stupid, violent people doing stupid, violent things.

Do you ever find yourself imagining the absolute worst way that something could play out? If so, I'm sorry to inform you that Guthrie is far better at it than you will ever be. We start off with a simple situation: married May Baxter's pregnant, but not with her husband's child. In order to escape her spouse's violence, she flees back to her family. From that point on, things get worse in every possible way. Every gesture, action, and plan leads to things only spiraling even further out of control.

Hard Man is a book of two paces: the contemplative and the berserk. Things start for Gordon Pearce in the first of them. He spends his day in a passive daze, his only activity taking his three legged dog to the beach. He has no friends and no aspirations. Though he is no longer a young man, and though he's most certainly a hard man, he's still trying to come to grips with existence as a free man and with his mother now long gone, the (male) dog with her name an attempt to fill the hole that she left.

Balanced with Pearce is the tale of the Baxter family. Elderly Jacob Baxter is determined to force Wallace to stay away, which shouldn't be too hard a task for him, his two sons, and his friend, Norrie. Unfortunately, Jacob's can do worldview is curbstomped within the first few pages of the novel. On their walk to Wallace's home, he's confident that the Baxters cannot be stopped: They were all tooled up, they'd handle Wallace no problem, reputation or not. He was only one man against three, and those three were Baxters. (p. 4). Now, dragging himself away, he's been humbled - but he'll still do whatever it takes to stop Wallace.

Of course, there's the fact that Wallace is far stronger than they are, the fact that the police are (after the Baxter family's disastrous attempted assault) solidly on Wallace's side, the fact that family friend Norrie is far more mentally impaired than he appears, and the fact that Jacob's eldest son might not be the bouncer that he claims he is. But Jacob resolutely ignores the warning signs. He has a duty to his family, and he'll be damned if he doesn't carry it out.

Jacob Baxter isn't the only character who doesn't quite grasp the way that things are. It's a bit of a cliché to say that nothing is as it seems, but the phrase is rarely as true as it is here. Things look straightforward, but they are, of course, far more complicated than they appear. Climactic confrontations are often met with confusion, and dramatic reveals generally just succeed in making things messier and more confusing than they were moments before.

As the novel continues, and every plothread does its best to run off in its own direction as fast as it possibly can, things lean increasingly toward the latter of the two aforementioned pacings: the frantic. Hard Man is told from several point of views, and each of their scenes is brief, here, while the various characters act decisive in all the worst ways.

Guthrie does not spare his characters the consequences of their actions; instead, every mistake is magnified, its toll taken in injuries and tragedies. The cast is too small for a particularly high body count, but Guthrie bashes his pieces together again and again until there isn't much left of their original shape, and the deaths that do occur are always utterly and mercilessly senseless.

Guthrie depicts his novel's visceral violence with a clear, uncluttered prose style that's packed with character and slang. Descriptions of beaches and people give the novel a Scottish flair that's augmented with the language, shoving us in the center of the lowest, most dangerous neighborhoods of Guthrie's neighborhood and never losing its wry humor:

"Pearce's towel had flown off, dropped to the floor. He relaxed. Well, as much as he could, given that he was bullock-naked in front of a pair of strange men. Young men. Who clearly weren't here to ask after his health. At least they weren't naked, too. That would have been really uncomfortable." (p. 7)

The outside world around our characters is a distant thing. Civilization is present, but it's always nearby, never on the scene itself. Decent areas of town are only a few blocks away, and the scent of barbecues reaches us where we are, but we can never get there, and the only times the novel departs from its primary cast is to show briefly panoramic views of sin all around them, rapes and assaults taking place in newspapers and the streets around their homes.

In the midst of the book's escalation, Guthrie takes one of the major plot threads and slams it into an imprisoned stasis. The change of pace and the situation, especially when balanced by the rest of the cast outside, is excellent, but it's also here that the novel's two weaknesses occur.

The first is comparatively minor, more a missed opportunity than a weakness in and of itself. At one point, a character is fed an obscene amounts of hallucinogenics. Unfortunately, the results turn out to be the same lackluster lines that we've all heard before in a dozen pot-baked comedies.

The more serious problem is the book's supposed villain, Wallace. The build up against him is well done, and his mixture of innocence and depravity is captivating, but the few glimpses we get of the man's core do little to answer our questions. Wallace is frightening precisely because of the contrast between his normality and his actions, but there's nothing that we see of him, either in his point of view or outside it, to explain what could have led him to such sadistic heights, leaving one of the book's most horrific scenes feeling almost out of character.

But such problems do little to damage the narrative as a whole. Hard Man is, to quote a certain Bay Area thrash band, good friendly violent fun. With emphasis on the fun. And on the violent.

Hard Man, Allan Guthrie (2007)

On his Web site, Noir Originals, Allan Guthrie defines noir. Part of the definition is that the main characters are usually "victims, crooks, lunatics or are generally shafted in some major way." His book Hard Man definitely fits that definition.

Gordon Pearce is an ex-con. He did ten years for murdering the drug dealer who caused his (Pearse's) sister's death. Pearse is now out and working as a PI, mostly collecting debts. As Hard Man begins he is refusing a job for a family named the Baxters who need protection from Wallace, the estranged husband of their pregnant 16-year old daughter May. Wallace and Pearse are "hard," and events lead them to a confrontation.

Guthrie's prose is spare and fast: quick action, quick thinking, quick dialogue. Nothing extra.

When you read Hard Man, keep your eyes open for farce and references to Monty Python.

Can't wait to read my next Guthrie book.