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Two-Way Split

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Every now and then I come across a book that takes me completely by surprise. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked up my copy of TWO-WAY SPLIT by Allan Guthrie although I had my suspicions it would involve the darker side of life. At least I was correct in that assumption. What I wasn't prepared for was the superb depiction of a group of troubled people unknowingly digging themselves deeper and deeper into terrible trouble.

Robin Greaves, his wife Carol and her lover Eddie Soutar are robbers who are planning on robbing a post office in a daring daylight raid. Their plan, in order to get the cashiers to cooperate, is to utilise the two ingredients that they believe is common in all successful robberies: hostage taking and violence. It's not a perfect plan but it's a pretty good one and should have a good possibility of success. But a few ingredients are added to the set-up that not only tips the balance towards a more precarious outcome, but also turns the story into a melange of unexpected twists and turns.

The first glimmer that all may not go smoothly comes when Greaves finds out through a private investigator that Carol and Eddie are having an affair. Understandably Robin doesn't take the news well and the simmering rage he harbours looks like it could bubble over at any moment.

Possible problem number two is the revelation that Robin has already spent some time in a mental institution. In itself this wouldn't exactly be a problem, but we also know that he hasn't been taking some sort of medication for almost five months. When going into a tense situation carrying weapons, one wouldn't think that the ideal person to be watching your back is a betrayed husband, who may not be 100% mentally stable, would one?

Another problem is that a man named Pearce, a recently released prisoner who has done time for murder is planning on visiting his mother at lunchtime. Oh yeah...his mother works in a post office.

The final little fly in the ointment is the appearance of Don. (Keep an eye out for Don).

Guthrie has chosen to tell this story along a timeline, heading each new chapter with a timestamp which serves to remind us just how quickly the events unfold. It's a wonderfully tough crime novel set in Edinburgh in a suitably sleazy part of town where the feeling of desperation simply oozes off the pages. Massage parlours, broken down tenements and dirty alleyways form the grim backdrop to this dark story of greed, violence and betrayal.

There are no heroes in TWO-WAY SPLIT, in fact none of the main characters are particularly likable but what they lack in endearing personality they more than make up in complex obsessions. The gang of Robin, Carol and Eddie are doomed to fail from the start. What's unclear is just what character deficiency will be the one to ultimately trip them up. Pearce probably comes closest to hero status, at least displaying some sort of empathy with others. But he is also established as a man of extreme violence, much of it controlled and rather cold-blooded giving him a frighteningly dangerous air about him. And as for Don, well you'll just have to wait and read about him yourself.

At only around 180 pages long, it is an extremely fast-paced book with not a word wasted on overly long descriptions of incidental details. From the build up of the robbery to the robbery itself and beyond to the thieves apartment den, this is a tightly woven story that flow together seamlessly as all the main players are drawn inexorably together for a thrilling finale.

Although I've painted a picture of a rather dark story of violence, hatred and evil, it's a fascinating story that will keep you guessing as there is no telling in which direction Guthrie will take it next. From a simple robbery to a showdown of unbelievably unusual proportions, it's an engaging example of tartan noir that is very difficult to put down once picked up.

Allan Guthrie has restored my faith in contemporary crime fiction. After being burned by too many of today's crime writers who seem to be turning out nothing but repetitive, formulaic junk, Guthrie has come along with a book full of non-stop action, great characters, and a story that will leave to breathless. It's not a long book, but there's enough packed into it that you'd think it was 500 pages (if nothing else, this book is proof novels don't need to be long to be exciting). "Two-Way Split" brings a new twist to the usual caper novel, and the actual "split" will have you thinking of another crime writer named Jim Thompson, now deceased, but you'll see how much better Guthrie handled that particular motif than Thompson ever could.

Allan Guthire's Blithe Pyschopaths, renamed Two Way Split, is a tremendous debut effort. This is hard boiled noir, and not for those of tender sensibilities.

The Edinburgh winter in which the novel takes place is as stark as the tightly constructed plot. The viewpoint moves rapidly from character to character. Sophisticated writers can convey a lot of nuance to the reader with this format and Guthrie is more than up to the task.

Starting with a PI looking into a cheating wife, followed by a botched post office robbery the novel moves towards a tidy and surprisingly moral conclusion. Hugely flawed and often ironic characters dominate the action, but their flaws do not keep the reader from caring about them.

It is the dialog that remains with one long after putting the book down. Whether it the interior dialog of an acrophobic as he dangles from a poorly supported piece of scaffolding or the explicit dialog between a child abuser and the person sent to do him serious hard, Guthrie never fails to deliver crackling, witty repertoire.

Definitely recommended.

Al Guthrie's TWO-WAY SPLIT is written in the same rich tradition as noir pioneers like Wade Miller, Charles Williams, and James M. Cain. (In fact, TWS is the perfect modern equivalent of those vintage, fabulous Gold Medal PBOs that crime fiction readers enjoy.) But TWS is very much set in today's gritty Edinburgh. The plot is twisty; the pace breakneck; the prose muscular; and the dialogue laconic -- all the right ingredients to brew a wicked stew. And yet just enough humanity manages to peeks in by the end. Robin Greaves holds up a post office. Simple enough, right? But the robbery goes awry. A killer named Pearce's "mum" works for the post office. Greaves soon faces more problems than he ever bargained for, starting with escaping the ticked-off Pearce. The double-crosses and intrigue ripen this tough crime drama. Desperate, savage types are pitted against each other and you're swept along spellbound, unable to stop reading until you finally see how it all shakes out. If noir is your thing, TWO-WAY SPLIT should go at the top of your reading list.

Allan Guthrie's "Two-Way Split" is a neat little gem of noir - pulp crime fiction reminiscent of Elmore Leonard or James Ellroy. Set in the damp, cold, and dismal Edinburgh winter, it is the story of second-rate criminal Robin Greaves and his conniving wife Carol, who's having an affair with Eddie, Robin's Robin's friend and fellow gang member. But the naive Robin suspects mischief, and hires a comically sleazy private detective to get the goods on his wife. But when the trio botches an armed robbery at the local post office, all Hell breaks loose, and Robin's plans for revenge take a bloody, and increasingly more complex, detour. For what starts as a fairly straightforward cops-and-robbers caper spins into a byzantine maze of psychosis and paranoia, sweetened by tough-guy Pearce, the recently released ex-con who's now breaking legs for the resident Edinburgh loan shark. Fate crosses Robin's gang-who-couldn't-shoot-straight with the deadly Pearce's path, taking a few twists along the way to a storyline that unexpectedly unravels a few decades of sordid family history.

Guthrie's dialog is lean and crisp, setting a lively pace through chronological vignettes keeping the well-developed characters connected in space and time. Style wise, I was reminded of Jim Thompson's classic "The Getaway", though towards the end Guthrie's writing got a bit bogged down in trying to help the reader stay abreast with Robin and his whacked-out crew - you'll find that the loot isn't the only thing that's split in this twisted jewel of a story.

While this may be a notch below recent works from Duane Swierczynski, Charlie Huston, or Ken Bruen, it takes a creative spin down a well-traveled road, is highly entertaining, and well worth the time and money.

"The holdall sat on the bed like an ugly brown bag of conscience." Fans of classic crime writing will get a kick or five out of TWO-WAY SPLIT, and we're talking classic: Allan Guthrie's multi-character exploration of Edinburgh's underbelly marries the spare, laconic prose of James M. Cain with the psychological grotesqueries of Jim Thompson at his most lurid. And yet this is by no means a period piece. Guthrie's unhurried, deadpan style is timeless even as it evokes the changing face of modern Edinburgh, as seen through the eyes of the novel's most sympathetic character, Pearce - although sympathetic is a relative term, given that Pearce has been recently released from prison after serving a ten-stretch for premeditated murder. The most delicious aspect of the tale is its refusal to indulge in the sturm und drang of hyperbolic gore, despite being couched in the narrative of a revenge fantasy. Instead, and while it fairly bristles with the frisson of potential violence at every turn, Guthrie cranks up the tension notch by notch by the simple expedient of having his characters grow ever more quietly desperate as the pages turn. The result is a gut-knotting finale that unfurls with the inevitability of all great tragedy and the best nasty sex - it'll leave you devastated, hollowed out, aching to cry and craving more. - Declan Burke, Crime Always Pays

Ian Rankin is Edinburgh's best known crime writer ,thanks to the Rebus novels.Guthrie also sets this -his debut novel-in Scotland's capital city ,shown here in a light that would not please the City Fathers or the Tourist Board.This is not the Venice of the North ,as some have dubbed the city,but rather life as it is lived by the criminal underclass and the impoverished.It takes place largely on drug riddled .unemployment rife sink estates where decay and poverty are endemic and loan sharks enforce harsh retribution on defaulters.

It opens in the office of a failing private investigation agency where Robin Greaves is receiving bad news from the detective he has engaged -his wife Carol is indeed having sex with his partner ,Eddie.The trio are an armed robbery gang,and despite Robin being a seething mass of anger against the others in the gang they go ahead with the robbery palnned for that afternoon.In the course of the robbery Hilda a postal clerk is killed by Robin .She is the mother of Pearce ,a strong arm man for the local loan shark Cooper ,and a man who has served 10 years in gaol for killing the drug dealer who supplied his late sister with the drugs that killed her.Pearce wants revenge and sets out to track down the kilers and kill them.The PI -whose nose Greaves broke on hearing the news about Carol-saw the killing and tries to do a deal with Pearce-the name in exchange for the money from the robbery

Events move with speed and momentum and they involve a presence named Don who may or may not have killed Carol -and who seems dangerously unbalanced.Things move to a blood drenched climax in Greaves's apartment .

This is a violent book and the dialogue and narrative are saturated with expletives ,casual sex and drug taking and if you are angered by these ingredients please avoid the book because it needs a strong stomach .None of the characters are likeable although Perace is shown as having a tender side as evidenced in his relationship with Ailsa ,a debtor who he helps out by warning off her abusive boyfriend .

The book is tightly plotted,has a small dramatis personae and moves like a speeding bullet .It is hardboiled to the max and wholly without superfluous words or plot strands.Everybody in it is damaged emotionally -from Robin whose promise as a pianistic prodigy foundered on illness,to Cooper-a borderline childmolester .

These are damaged people in a damaged society and you should only read about them if modern noir is your thing

Reading Guthrie's hard-boiled crime dramas is tantamount to entering another dimension, a twilight zone where none of the usual rules apply and Darwin's theory is ascendant. Not for the faint of heart, these characters are hardly nuanced: their world is black and white, the criminal code of honor as convoluted as a fun house mirror. You can be sure that the violence that explodes in the first chapter is only the prelude to the mayhem that follows, as Guthrie's assortment of eccentrics bully and blunder their way through a criminal underground that only respects force. In the netherworld of take-no-prisoners Edinburgh noir, Two-Way Split promises a rough ride, men who live by their wits and their weaknesses, the predators and their prey.

After a post office robbery goes bad, an innocent woman killed in the commission of the crime, the thieves slink back to their lair to wait out the heat. Their second such robbery, this one is an unqualified success except for the death of the woman and the fact that none of the thieves are trustworthy. Robin Greaves' wife, Carol, has been having an affair with the other gang member, Eddie and Robin has the surveillance photographs to prove it. Even worse, the trio has been followed from the crime scene by a suspicious PI who isn't afraid to take advantage of their predicament. But the really bad news is the determination of a brokenhearted man, the son of murdered Hilda Pearce, just released from prison for taking out the junkie responsible for his sister's death. The loss of his mother a bitter blow, Pearce is beyond grief, his every waking moment focused on revenge.

The protagonist of Guthrie's Hard Man, Pearce is the great equalizer in this novel. While Robin, Carol and Eddie act out their macabre dance, Pearce goes into action, tipped off as to the identity of Hilda's killer. On a rendezvous with revenge, he has no way of knowing the insanity that waits at the end of his quest. All the monsters are out of the closet and Pearce is about to meet them face to face. Gruesome and brutal, the stuff of nightmares, Guthrie winds up his blood-soaked tale with an over-the-top craziness that follows these miscreants wherever they go, Pearce matching their outrageous actions with his own. While this flawed hero is a bit hinky and truly conscienceless villains run amok, the plot is a wild ride, the brakes burned out along the way. The tough, honorable Pearce is a winner, a vigilante with a soul. Luan Gaines/2007.

'The inward fire eats the soft marrow away, and the internal wound bleeds on in silence' (Virgil, The Aeneid, 4.93-94)

Something got me in its grip while reading this masterpiece of noir. Something like a green, bent mamba. TWO-WAY SPLIT prevents access to oxygen by means of a steadily tightening plot. Things start out slow. Robin Greaves, a failed pianist stuck in a fragile state of mind like an animal that's hunted for too small a hole, has hired an oddly styrofoam-esque, clumsy PI. Greaves' wife Carol seems to carry on with the couple's best pal Eddie. When proof of infidelity gets delivered, the pace of events gains sudden momentum, and madness is closer than the reader knows.

Guthrie is scarily in control of his material, which seems completely shaped for a camera. His approach is so sober, so clinical, so external that he just hovers above his made up bunch of battered characters instead of getting involved: explanations, let alone hope never catches up with the goings-on. The style is impersonal and hard; the short, often lewd dialogs both echo and mock the very terror of lowlife existences and appear fit for the darkest side of screenworld. (Can't wait!)

Time, its passage has an especial home in TWO-WAY SPLIT: the reader cannot stay away from annihilation no matter how hard he tries, because the author turns toward ticking clocks all the time. Maybe the story's crimes and corpses itself are a diversion. Brutality and chaos may dominate the narrative, but the real question is, what is happening to sick souls cracked like nuts - souls that won't become whole again, while lives pass a shade faster than you expect? Guthrie zaps his readers with chases, violence and more chases; there's beating and killing and swearing and revenge attempts until the plot rotates into something that can best be described as the final, calm taking back of all future possibilities and prospects: game over.

In the course of pulpy events the reader gets to know a messy crew of underdog protagonists whose fates appear oddly glued together, then flung into a Scottish winter. The sky above Edinburgh is cold and empty - no deities to turn to. Robin, his wife Carol and accomplice Eddie screw up a post office robbery. Pearce, an ex-convict who drifts forlorn through his stony garden of thoughts ever since his sister Muriel's drug-related death more than a decade ago, loses his mother during said heist, which prompts him to turn to lunatic thoughts of revenge - the theme of his itchy life set on the edge of nothing. He also happened to trust the wrong woman and struggles with loan shark issues, a fact that leads to Ailsa's door. Her situation's black, bleak, sick as well: no money, no hiding from a hot-headed ex-bedfellow for her and her daughter. A deep deep yes would be her answer to a caring guy, but this is Guthrie land, where good does no good, and even potted plants look evil. Which is why Robin's brother Don can't free himself from harmful formulas in his attempt to reconnect, and gumshoe Kennedy fails to become that very different person, one hope away.

Go get a hold of this book. It listens carefully to how underdogs talk. It offers believable, though not lovable characters. This is Guthrie land - a nice place that makes you consider to sleep with a gun under your pillow.

'When I'm laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast. Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate'

Henry Purcell, Dido's lament, Dido and Aeneas

I first discovered Two-Way Split a bit over a year ago and it was my first foray into the dark wonderful mind that is Allan Guthrie. I quickly tracked down everything I could find, but Two-Way Split is as good a place to start out as any. Allan's work is lean and fast-paced, with great characters (like them or not) and snapping dialogue. If you're a fan of gritty noir, I highly recommend trying out Allan's work. Another favorite is Slammer, which easily made my list of top 10 reads of 2010 (which was full of great work). Highly recommended work and author.