Customer Reviews

Saturday's Child

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SATURDAY'S CHILD by Ray Banks is about as good as modern crime novels get. It's got plenty of blood, street action, and a semi-sympathetic anti-hero protagonist for you to root for and shake your head at, by turns. Cal Innes is the kind of character you learn to love despite all his failures, mistakes, and generally abrasive personality. Because through his own internal dialogue we come to understand him, even those parts of him that we wish we didn't. SATURDAY'S CHILD is a fast-paced, action-packed, completely cynical story written in a lean mean style. ALthough some of the UK idioms may be losto n US readers, don't let it stop you--the language is all part of the draw and atmosphere. If you're a fan of neo-noir writing, give this one a try along with works by Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes, and Allan Guthrie.

Dark, violent, and filled with non-stop action, this British PI novel, set on the meanest streets of Manchester and Newcastle, features Cal Innes, a PI who claims that he became a detective because "I got good at tracking down ex-offenders, maybe because I was one." Newly released from prison, Cal has been talked into doing a "favor" for Morris Tiernan, a Manchester crime lord responsible for more than thirty murders. Afraid that his psychopathic son Mo will mess up the job, Tiernan has "persuaded" Cal to find Rob Stokes, a dealer in Tiernan's private gambling club who stole ten thousand dollars and disappeared. Once Cal finds Stokes, he is to contact the sadistic Mo, who will then take over.

Cal and Mo have a "history." Cal considers Mo responsible for the more than two years he had to spend in jail. Mo, in turn, is jealous that his father has assigned Cal to find Stokes, and he wants to find Stokes first. The narrative, alternating between the point of view of Cal Innes and that of Mo Tiernan, is easy to follow, since Mo is terminally dense, and his narrative, peppered with local street slang and obscenities, becomes mordantly humorous. Cal, who often finds his fists more useful than his brain, is not much more literate than Mo, but he is looking for a direction in life--if only to stay out of jail--and he does understand how the world works.

As the search for Stokes moves from Manchester to Newcastle, where Stokes appears to have fled with a sixteen-year-old girl, the action--and gore--ratchet up. Cal is not only dodging vicious Mo Tiernan, he is also trying to avoid a brutal Manchester policeman who has accused him of assault. As Cal comes closer to finding Stokes and the girl, he also becomes a real detective, discovering aspects of Mo Tiernan's life which make the search for Stokes and the girl even more pressing--and make Mo's determination to find and stop Cal more urgent.

Bleak and full of violence, the novel features fights, an attempted drowning by toilet bowl, beatings, and legs broken by cricket bat--and that's by the "good guys"! Cal, of course, is on both the giving and receiving ends of this brutality. The characters throughout the novel are universally unlikable, the twists and turns of the action reveal even more depravity than previously imagined, and the "surprise" ending brings no catharsis with it. Banks creates vivid scenes filled with specific details--everything from brands of cars, complete with dents, to close-up depictions of torture and maiming. Focused on man's inhumanity to man and the unavoidability of misery, this is noir fiction at its "noir-est." n Mary Whipple

The Big Blind

Saturday's Child is in a world of hurt. After doing two and a half years of a five year stretch, out on parole with six months left to do, Callum Innes is a backroom PI, without a license but doing all right. Until "Uncle" Morris Tiernan calls in a favor Cal doesn't owe. Nobody turns Tiernan down. With thirty-seven dead men behind his name, Tiernan is not a man to ignore. The job he wants Cal to do is simple: locate a card dealer who took off with a bundle of Tiernan's money and call Tiernan's son, Mo, a drug-addled thug. Expecting to do the job himself, Mo cops an attitude towards Innes, determined to put Cal in his place and prove to his father that he is the right man for the job. With his two equally pathetic sidekicks, Mo sets out to shadow Cal and mess up the investigation and the investigator, stopping along the way for random acts of violence and tough-guy posturing, fueled by an assortment of pills that would take down an elephant.

Cal isn't making much progress when he learns that the missing guy may be in Newcastle, up the road from Manchester. And he finds out there is another twist to this plot, an essential link Uncle Morris left out when he hired Innes. Like Mo, Cal has his own demons, notably a tendency to get drunk and lose his place, often falling into trouble for lack of clear thinking. But Cal is a stand-up guy who only wants to finish a dirty job and stay out of jail for another ride. Bruised and battered by the freaks along the way who don't appreciate his questions, Cal is working in the dark, frequently blindsided by unforeseen circumstances: "Fear, otherwise known as the body's own caffeine."

A would-be hard man in a world of petty crooks and posers, Innes is about to make good on the case when events once more spiral into chaos, Mo's lack of impulse control and street patois filling the odd chapter with the menace of the unpredictable. Banks writes with authority and a keen voice, his transplanted lad from Leith struggling to survive the ordeals of Manchester, dodging career criminals like Tiernan and his dodgy son and not doing too good a job of it. Throw in a violent cop who targets Innes for a trip back to prison and this is a guy who can't get a break- at least at his level of society. Low and mean, Cal's world requires grit and courage, all of which this young protagonist has in abundance. A wild read, Banks holds nothing back, the street as ugly as the denizens who prey on one another. Innes will count himself lucky to escape this convoluted dilemma, to live to outwit another day. Luan Gaines/ 2007.

Ray Banks takes the PI novel by the throat and gives it a good kicking. This is a cracking start to a great quartet filled with pitch black humour, realistic situations & people that you could stumble into everyday.It certainly isn't 'Midsummer Murders'!

I tend to like British crime novels, and since I had a great few days in Manchester many years ago, I figured I'd check out this first in a Manchester-set series featuring ex-con Cal Innes. After taking the fall for a botched robbery led by the psycho son of a local crimelord, Cal did about half of a five-year stretch. Since his release, he's been eking out a living as a kind of informal detective, doing odds and ends of work for all kinds of people while trying to keep his prodigious drinking somewhat under control, and himself out of jail.

When the crimelord asks him to track down a blackjack dealer who's made off with 10k of his house money, it's less a request than an order, and one Cal can't really refuse. Unfortunately for Cal, he's not the most subtle detective, and soon enough he's raised enough hackles to be in a fight or three. Meanwhile, the crimelord's son is upset that he hasn't been given the task of tracking the dealer down, and is intent on scaring Cal off the job. The story unfolds in brief chapters alternating between Cal's voice and that of the psycho son, as the story takes them up to Newcastle in pursuit of the dodgy dealer. (Both voices are laden with regional and drug slang, so those who have problems deciphering these be forewarned.)

Needless to say, not everything is as it seems, but Cal has to learn that the hard way. And the hard way was never so hard as it is in this book, as Cal gets battered, bloodied and beaten to pulp (and to be fair, doles out some of same in kind). The book is a very physical one, not only in the sense of the batterings bodies take, but also in the way that the reader is made acutely aware of everything the main characters ingest, from pills, to booze, to smokes, to greasy cafe food. There's something about it that makes one very aware of the human body.

The plot itself is pretty straight-forward, but the pacing is such that you're sucked along the simple ride pretty quickly. (There are minor subplots involving a Manchester cop hassling Cal, and a potential romantic interest in Newcastle.) The ending is rather interesting, not a typical crime story ending, but more in keeping with some of the bleak films of the early 1970s. That rescues it from feeling otherwise a little thin, and the whole thing feels like a bit of a warmup for more involved future stories about Cal (which appear in the book's sequels, Sucker Punch and No More Heroes (Cal Innes).)

Ex-con and unofficial PI Callum Innes has no choice but to help gang lord Morris Tiernan find an employee who's disappeared with some of Morris's money. But Tiernan's nasty son, Mo, has sinister plans for Cal, when the time is right.

The badly beaten man left for dead in this novel is only a subplot. The main story is Cal's quest to find the employee and figure out how he's going to stay out of trouble while doing so. The police think he's responsible for the beating, and every time Cal gets a little closer to finding the missing employee something violent happens.

There's plenty to like about this fast paced novel. The dialogue's terrific and the author's narrative descriptions are amazing. Check out Cal's sparring match with his friend, Paulo, on pages 109 to 112. Wow. Also strong are Cal's and Mo's voices. The story's told from two points of view, both first person and in present tense, yet it's easy to identify who's speaking simply by the language used. Of course, Mo doesn't have much of a vocabulary beyond the usual four-letter assortment.

Although Cal's not the world's smartest protagonist, he is an intriguing character. A down-on-his-luck man addicted to tobacco and alcohol is a stereotype, sure, but I rooted for this guy. Despite his many mistakes and lack of common sense, Cal wants to do a little better, be a little better. Yet for every step he takes forward, he falls back two. And still he doesn't pack it in.

Great books aren't just about engaging plots and interesting characters. They're about emotion. Emotion in the story and an emotional response from the reader. SATURDAY'S CHILD certainly got a response from me, which was why I wanted more from the ending. To explain further might give too much away. So, read the book and enjoy.

The story line was flooded with characters who also had multiple nicknames. It made following the plot cumbersome and disjointed. I think a fold out schematic of characters would have helped somewhat. But in the end the writing style was slanted to a thin slice of readers in the UK that I couldn't identify. It was clear to me that the author needs to take some basic writing classes.

Ray Banks makes me want to give up on writing. I hate him, but I want more. Lucky for me, that's going to happen soon.