A Simple Act of Violence [Paperback]

R.J. Ellory (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0752891898
• ISBN-13: 978-0752891897
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #460,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Roger Jon Ellory was born in Birmingham, England, June 20th 1965 at Sorento Hospital. The hospital has now been demolished. There is no direct evidence that the two events were linked.

His father having already left before Roger was born, he was then orphaned at the age of seven. His mother, Carole - an actress and dancer - died as a result of a pneumonia epidemic that claimed more than a dozen victims in the early 1970s. In 1973 Roger was swiftly despatched to a boarding school and stayed there until he was sixteen. Upon leaving school he returned to Birmingham to live with his maternal grandmother. His grandfather had already drowned off the Gower Peninsula in the south of Wales in 1957. In April of 1982 Roger's grandmother died following a number of heart attacks.

At seventeen years of age he was arrested for poaching. He was charged,tried, and sentenced to a jail term which he served without causing too much trouble. Upon his release he vanished quietly into relative obscurity to pursue interests in graphic design, photography and music. As a guitar player in a band called 'The Manta Rays' he was partly responsible for their reputation as the loudest band south of Manchester and north of London. Following the untimely death of their drummer, Roger quit the music scene and devoted himself to studying obscure philosophies and reading. Through the complete works of Conan Doyle, Michael Moorcock, JRR Tolkien, numerous books by Stephen King and many others, his interest in fiction steadily grew, not only from the viewpoint of a reader, but a burgeoning interest as a writer.

Roger began his first novel on November 4th, 1987 and did not stop, except for three days when he was going through a divorce from his first wife, until July of 1993. During this time he completed twenty-two novels, most of them in longhand, and accumulated several hundred polite and complimentary rejection letters from many different and varied publishers. The standard response from the UK publishing trade was that they could not consider the possibility of publishing books based in the United States written by an Englishman. He was advised to send his work to American publishers, which he duly did, and received from them equally polite and complimentary rejection letters that said it was not possible for American publishers to publish books set in the US written by an Englishman. Roger stopped writing out of sheer frustration and did not start again until August 2001. Between August 2001 and January 2002 he wrote three books, the second of which was called Candlemoth. This was purchased by Orion UK and published in 2003. How and why it was published is another story entirely, which if you ever go to one of Roger's events he will tell you! Candlemoth was translated into German, Dutch and Italian. The book also secured a nomination on the shortlist for the Crime Writers' Association Steel Dagger for Best Thriller 2003.

Roger's second book, Ghostheart, was released in 2004 in the UK, and his third book, A Quiet Vendetta, was released in August 2005. In 2006 he published City of Lies, and once again secured a nomination for the CWA Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of that year. City of Lies was also translated into Bulgarian and made available in Large Print. His fifth book - A Quiet Belief In Angels - was published in August 2007, and in the latter part of the year it was selected for the phenomenally successful British TV equivalent of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, the Richard and Judy Book Club. The book was purchased for translation into more than twenty languages including French, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian, Norwegian and Lithuanian, released on both abridged and unabridged audio, and made available in Large Print. As of mid-2008, there were more than 300,000 copies of the book in circulation in the UK alone. It was shortlisted for the Barry Award for Best British Crime Fiction Novel of 2008, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers' Prize, the Europeen Du Point Award, and was the winner of the Inaugural Prix Roman Noir Nouvel Observateur in France. Roger has also been contracted to write the screenplay by Oscar-winning writer and director of 'Le Vie En Rose', Olivier Dahan.

In September of 2009 A Quiet Belief In Angels will be released by Overlook Press in the United States.

Currently there are a further three books due for release in the UK - the first in the fall of 2009 ('The Anniversary Man'), the second in 2010, and Roger is currently working on the third which will be released in 2011.

On numerous occasions people have tried to identify Roger's work with a particular genre - crime, thriller, historical fiction - but this categorisation has been a relatively fruitless endeavour. Roger's ethos is merely to work towards producing a good story, something that encapsulates elements of humanity and life without necessarily slotting into a predetermined pigeonhole. He attempts to produce an average of forty thousand words a month, and aims to get a first draft completed within three to four months. His wife thinks he is a workaholic, his son considers him slightly left-of-centre, but they put up with him regardless. His son has long since been aware of the fact that 'dad' buys stuff, and thus his idiosyncrasies should be tolerated.

Roger doesn't read anywhere enough books, doesn't watch enough movies, and keeps trying to remedy these omissions. To date he has routinely failed.

Recently he read a book called 'How Not To Write A Novel' by David Armstrong. His favourite quote from this book went along the lines of 'The harder you work the luckier you get'. He agrees with this principle, and thus has no intention of retiring from anything, ever.

He's just going to keep on writing, and he hopes people keep on reading, and now there are people showing up to readings and signings that he has never met before, he feels that his purpose as a writer is at last being accomplished.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sacred Monster and its heart of darkness, October 10, 2008

By 

OEJ Aboard (England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Simple Act of Violence (Paperback)

If this is your first foray into the writings of R J Ellory, you will miss the subtle joke that he's playing on the reader. For several of the early pages I couldn't stop smiling, and I can imagine him smiling broadly himself as he composed his words. Not that there's anything remotely funny about the subject matter, which starts off with the brutal murder of a woman in her Washington DC home and which soon develops into a serial killer investigation. What gave the secret away were the words in the dust jacket : "Detective Robert Miller is assigned to the case". So blatantly corny, so stereotypical of countless crime fiction thrillers, that I knew that among other things, the author had made the decision to write in a particular style that would be as different as possible from the five novels that preceded it, which incidentally are all very different from one another too. There's nothing corny or stereotypical about the narrative or dialogue itself, I hasten to add; Ellory is an exceptionally talented story-teller with this unusual capacity to select a particular style and stick with it so as to give that specific novel an identity of its own such that it stands apart from the story itself. He has succeeded, yet again.

Having said that, there is a small but significant reminder in its concept that reminds me of his third novel A QUIET VENDETTA, that being the development of a relationship between the leading character and his nemesis. This time around, it isn't a case of the hunted telling his life story to his hunter, rather it emerges that the hunter finds himself being manipulated if not directed by his key suspect such that every step of his investigation seems to have been orchestrated and controlled. It is in every sense a suspense thriller, a tale in which the detective pursues endless leads and forensic trails only to find that every single one leads to nothing. Dead people have names, addresses, jobs and bank accounts but little evidence that they ever existed. Potential witnesses vanish without trace. Life histories appear to be utterly fabricated. It's a painful pleasure to share the maddening emotions that Detective Miller has to endure throughout this case, which unusually for Ellory is spread over a very short period, just over a week in fact.

Inevitably however there is some looking back into the past, and not for the first time in this writer's portfolio, some attempts are made to expose the hypocrisies of America's political landmarks. I was reminded of vaguely similar efforts by the legendary James Ellroy and his epics AMERICAN TABLOID and its sequel THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, which attempted to seduce readers into thinking that the facts behind such events as presidential assassinations and American involvement in various conflicts - some of its own making - were not in any way accurately reported in the media. So we have another feast for conspiracy lovers, but it was a touch disappointing to see that despite the time-stamp of 2006 there was almost no mention at all of the invasion of Iraq three years earlier. In fairness that conspiracy would appear to be motivated by a different kind of agenda to this one, so perhaps we can look forward to another day when Ellory will tailor a story to something more contemporary than this one, which took place in the Reagan administered years of the 1980s.

Where this novel excels is in its relentless capacity to build up tension and suspense. With 100 pages to go, I could not imagine an ending that could contain the explosive revelations, even though the reader has a rather better idea of what's going on than the unfortunate Detective Miller. Instead of vivid imagery and in-depth characterisation, just two skills that Ellory has demonstrated more than ably in the past, here he focuses on mystery, confusion and conspiracy. Some might argue that it is too far-fetched, that the historical events mentioned were not the work of some covert world-controlling agency, but then few if any of us have the evidence to prove otherwise. In any case, I don't buy novels such as this to shoot them down or try to out-guess the objectives or the reasons behind what's going on; I buy them to be entertained, to take myself away from the pretty grim and unattractive 'real world' that many of us are living in at the moment, and in this respect A Simple Act of Violence does exactly what I wanted it do, to provide some sense of escapism that isn't fantasy; it's about people and events that might just be as frighteningly real as they are portrayed here. So it's a maximum 5 stars once again, Ellory remaining the only author whose works I have read to get top marks from me for each and every novel published. Each of his novels is difficult to compare with any of his others because they are all so different, and as a writer I think he stands tall among all of his peers.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple Act Will Be A Hard Act To Follow!, October 9, 2008

By 

Big Bertha (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Simple Act of Violence (Paperback)

Apart from being the fourth victim of a serial killer, who is Catherine Sheridan? This is a question that had me fervently turning the pages of this book in an attempt to find the answer.

Detectives Robert Miller & Al Roth from the Second precinct are put on the case and are having no more luck than me (and I've got a whole other storyline running in tandem filling in the blanks for me). Every lead they follow draws a blank, every question they get answered leaves them with many more. They're faced with people that don't exist and events that never happened. Running alongside is another storyline, the story of John Robey that takes you into the undercover world of a CIA operative working alongside the rebel groups opposing Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Corruption, intrigue, brutality and a love story, this book has it all and will keep you turning the pages. The characters are real, they have weaknesses and they make mistakes.

How much is fiction, how much is based on fact? Not a question I can answer at this time, but it's something I want to know more about. The setting and storyline cover events that, I'm ashamed to admit; I know very little about. The amount of research that must have gone into this book is astounding and all credit to the author, he left me wanting to know more.

This book is a lot faster paced than Ellory's A Quiet Belief In Angels and the main storyline takes place over 10 days, with the back story filling in the historical details. Roger Ellory has got the balance just right with sufficient information to make it interesting without it turning into a text book.

I have read all of his previous novels and they're all very different and therefore hard to compare but this one is certainly up there with my favourites. It far exceeded my expectations, I couldn't put it down, but at the same time I didn't want it to end! Now I just want to read it all over again.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gift to anyone who dares open the cover, April 23, 2009

By 

DG or GD - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Simple Act of Violence (Paperback)

This is my first reading of anything by R.J. Ellory, but it won't be my last. The book, as one writer put it, is literature, but it is so much, much more, and I absolutely could not stop until the last word and until that last word (phrase) did I have any idea what had hit me. What a marvel, and I am thankful for the privilege to have opened the first page. Turning them couldn't happen fast enough.