Customer Reviews

Robbie's Wife

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"I kept thinking about how much of my life was accidental. I drank with the Stryker brothers and ended up in Maggie's house.... I could have stopped at the second beer and left Glastonbury, gone on to London and, even now, I would be in Los Angeles in a rented room rather than walking a country lane thinking of Maggie.... But it hadn't happened that way. I would not reflect on those events until it was too late." -- from Robbie's Wife

Jack Stone has come from Los Angeles to England to make a new start. To get away from his second failed marriage and possibly write the screenplay that will rejuvenate his career. But he didn't count on falling in love with Maggie Barlow, the wife of a Dorset sheep farmer who offers a laid-back bed-and-breakfast arrangement.

A Hard Case Crime novel by an award-winning poet? Is this another departure on a par with Straight Cut? Well, yes and no. Robbie's Wife is more typical noir than that book (especially in the second half), but author Russell Hill's superb characterizations will appeal to readers of all stripes.

It may be the second Hard Case Crime novel in a row (after Lawrence Block's Lucky at Cards) to feature a newcomer-to-town who takes up with a married woman who is much more than the daily role she plays would lead us to believe, but otherwise Robbie's Wife could not be more different. It is a novel unto its own genre.

I really admired Hill's giving a romantic storyline to characters who are older than the typical genre participants. Jack is sixty, while Maggie is a relative spring chicken at forty. But age really doesn't come into play at all, with Jack still expected to act out the requirements of Hill's surprise-filled plot with the strength and stamina of a much younger man. Love at a certain age is both riskier and more compelling than I had thought possible, but these two make it into quite an attractive proposition (especially during some of the most tastefully erotic sex scenes I've read in some time).

Hill takes his time in offering up the expected noir trappings (essentially an update of familiar James M. Cain territory), but this allows the reader to get swept up in Jack and Maggie's illicit and delicious, heart-lifting and stomach-knotting relationship. Robbie's Wife is a beautiful, painfully tragic portrait of two people who, despite their attempts to the contrary, simply cannot stand to be away from each other. Like Jack states, "She was a magnet and I was nothing more than iron filings on a sheet of paper [darting] toward it, unable to do anything else."

Interspersed among Jack's narrative of real events are pieces of his ongoing screenplay, which uses those real events for inspiration. Hill slips these in at unexpected times, and even uses them to distance us from a particularly harrowing scene as it plays out on the script page. It is a very welcome change of pace in a genre that often depends on the same old setup to get things moving. Things eventually get moving, all right, and they quickly spiral out of control, but never from Hill's point of view. He guides every part of the novel's evocative (and, in the right places, provocative) plotline with a sure hand to its powerfully shocking conclusion. With a fascinating mix of the familiar and the not new but nearly forgotten, Robbie's Wife is sure to be one of the ten best books of 2007.

This was about the 10th book in the Hardcase Crime series that I have read and it was much different than all of the others. While it had some elements of crime noir fiction, it was much more literary and much more deliberate. It had none of the rapid fire, crackle and snap of other stories, but that is not a bad thing. If you are looking for Lawrence Block or Erle Stanley Garder type fiction, look elsewhere, but if you want a different take on noir fiction read "Robbie's Wife".

This book contains many nice surprises. Here are just a few:

1) The writing quality is considerably more sophisticated than most noir.
2) This book evolves in surprising, but justified ways.
3) The 'writer as protagonist' technique works very well.
4) Hill does a good job of incorporating real life facts (culling of farm animals under Blair)
5) Hill has a good grasp for the under culture in the English countryside
6) Hill's characters are finely drawn. The dialog is rich in character, but moves along nicely.
7) Hill's 'sense of place' for rural England is very strong.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book that surprises in the end. Well worth picking up.

With its air of brooding menace, its American leading man in a rural British setting and its stifled sexual passion, I was half expecting this novel to be something along the lines of `Straw Dogs'. However, my suspicions were unfounded and `Robbie's Wife' is both tantalizing and engrossing with some surprising twists along the way.

A down on his luck American screenplay writer, Jack Stone, decamps to England to work on a project in Dorset. The cottage that he has rented for his stay turns out to be inadequate. He finds out that local farm owners, Robbie and Maggie Barlow take in lodgers. During his stay with them, Stone finds himself falling for Maggie - falling for her to such an extent that he begins to contemplate murder.

Hard Case Crime usually publishes reprints of pulp crime stories, but they have the occasional foray into original material. Russell Hill's excellent novel has its first publication here. Whilst times have obviously changed since the 1950s - which is when the bulk of Hard Case Crime's output originated - this novel, despite its contemporary setting and mores, still keeps to the spirit of the pulp fiction genre.

This is a novel that could appeal to a wider readership than crime fiction fans. I think it would also appeal to romance readers and to those who enjoy well written, character driven stories.

This is not really a 'Crime' novel. This is just a terrific Modern and Very Moving Novel, period! The characterizations are so real, as well as the places and events, that I felt sad when I finished the book, almost as if I knew these people and their tragedy had touched me. One of the best boks I've read in some time.

The plot is familiar and the characters sharply drawn, but something about "Robbie's Wife" doesn't feel new. The writing is classic noir, and the atmosphere is dead on LA, but it wasn't until I remembered James cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" that I knew where I had heard this plot before. Surely there are differences. Cain's effort has much more description, Hill's characters are more sharply drawn. If I had to chose I think this is the one I prefer if only because it is a quicker read and less preachy.

This is the tenth Hard Case I've managed to read in the last year or so, and so far I think this is the best of the lot right after Mickey Spillane's contribution. Nevertheless I haven't been even a little disappointed yet with the series and will plod onward as time and my will permits.

This is a really great read with wonderful twists. I am a hard crime fan and this is one of the best I have read. The imagery of the country side is amazing and the character development...really great. Enjoy this one on a gloomy day with some hot cide.

Russell Hill, Robbie's Wife
Review by R. R. Beaumont

After selling all his belongings, a screenwriter in the twilight of his career moves to rural England. Divorced, broke, and a dwindling supply of friends, Jack Stone is determined to write the movie that will bring him back on top.

Initially, Stone's waking hours are aimless, maddened by writer's block and leavened by English ale. On the verge of total despair, Stone lets a guest room in a country house where he immediately becomes infatuated with the farmer's wife, Maggie.

Originally planning to stay just a fortnight, Stone extends his stay and becomes enmeshed in the fabric of this English nuclear family. He begins writing pieces of an erotic screenplay featuring Maggie and himself, falling in love. Tempted by the flirtatious Maggie as well as jealous of the younger rugged husband, Stone dreams of running away with Maggie. Eventually, his desire is so great that it cannot remain within the frame of his fictional screenplay, and Stone takes fatal action.

Robbie's Wife uses a familiar noir narrative, seen in examples as far-ranging as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Grifter's Game: a stranger insinuates himself into the family, falls in love with the wife, and chooses to murder the husband. The first half of Russell Hill's novel follows this structure almost predictably and steadily, adding suspense to the inevitable murder.

Yet, Hill expertly adds some signature surprises to this theme, adding a richly textured variation to the noir canon. Stone's plan does not quite go as he or the reader expected, and the rest of the novel is a fast-paced maze of twists, turns, and surprises. Unlike the movies, Stone's story ends without resolution or happiness, and both he and the reader are left to speculate on the motives of the mysterious and beautiful Maggie.

i found this book to be a bit slow going at first. But the further i read on the more the story pulled me in. Great ending with a twist i did not see coming. I'll be looking for more form this author.

I resisted this book for some time, fearing it would be a retread of The Postman Always Rings Twice. It was not.
In fact, it was barely about a crime at all. What it was, was an extremely well-written meditation on loneliness and love late in life. A mediation on the vulnerability this love demands. A look at how loneliness can make you act in certain ways.
It took its time developing the characters, in bringing you to the central conflict. Russell is apparently a poet and this is very evident.

Hill is very good at describing the sheep-farming business and the English coutryside but he does not get bogged down by it. His plot moves forward and when I got to the end, he surprised me. Twice. Highly recommended.