THESE TWO BLISTERING NOIR novels confirm that their authors are the best in the genre in this country, writers who are pushing the boundaries of their discipline and who could easily transcend into wider mainstream success.
Beast of Burden is Ban
ks's fifth novel and the fourth to feature the wonderfully messed up Cal Innes, a private investigator working in the brutal environs of Manchester's underworld. Innes has been through the wringer in previous novels, and at the start of Beast of Burden he's struggling to come to terms with having suffered a massive stroke.
Walking with a stick and unable to speak properly, he's still working, in this instance for local crime lord Morris Tiernan, investigating the disappearance of his no-good son Mo.
Innes has plenty of history with the Tiernan family, and his own reasons for the investigation, and when Mo's body turns up early on in a rancid squat, things get decidedly more complicated. Thrown into this mix is Detective Sergeant "Donkey" Donkin, an old-school copper with a vindictive agenda of his own, who also sets out to find Mo's killer despite being suspended from the force.
The narrative is split between Innes and Donkey, a device used well to ramp up the tension. He gets inside the heads of both characters, especially Innes, who remains grimly funny despite being ground down by the relentless physical and mental pressure exerted on him over the four novels.
This is apparently the last in the Cal Innes series, a brave move from the author to quit while he's ahead in what could be a lucrative franchise. If Banks sticks to that plan, this is a suitably apocalyptic goodbye, one full of sharp plotting, fast action and searing black comedy.
For all its great qualities, Beast of Burden is still a conventional piece of noir fiction, but Allan Guthrie's Slammer succeeds in brilliantly turning the genre on its head in a book as inventive and groundbreaking as it is magnificently written.
Welcome to the descent into personal hell of Nick Glass, a prison officer at an Edinburgh institution. At the start of Slammer, Nick is a novice officer, green about the gills and naïve about the workings of prison life. He is constantly walking a tightrope, trying not to come into conflict with the brutally violent array of inmates, mercilessly picked on by the older guards for his apparent softness.
Sensing his weakness, Caesar, one of the leaders among the prisoners, makes easy pickings of him, and he winds up being blackmailed into becoming a drugs mule, shipping all sorts of narcotics inside for them.
There then follows a break-neck descent into chaotic, drug-fuelled violence, something which culminates in several dead and mutilated bodies, an attempted prison break-out, considerable amounts of nasty torture including missing fingers and a life-threatening situation for Nick's wife and young daughter.
But things are not quite what they seem. Just when you seem to know what's going on, Guthrie brilliantly pulls the rug out from under the reader's feet, throwing the whole story into a mess of confusion. The story has been told through Nick's eyes, and through a series of beautifully plotted twists and turns, we are lead to the conclusion that Nick's point of view is not as reliable as it first seemed, casting new doubt over everything.
It's a daring thing to attempt, but Guthrie pulls it off magnificently. Slammer is the most relentlessly page-turning novel this reviewer has come across in a long, long time, but Guthrie does so much more than just throw visceral action and sharp banter at the reader, teasing and cajoling us with red herrings and subtle foreshadowing, delving deep inside a mind that is quickly unravelling into psychotic madness.
At Slammer's core is a surprisingly subtle examination of what it means to be good or evil, and how easily that distinction can become blurred. Guthrie creates empathy for all his characters – there are no faceless monsters here – and in portraying the prisoners and their guards as two sides of the same human coin, he nails a universal truth about the nature of life and about the way we differentiate good and bad, sanity and madness.
With Slammer, Guthrie has written a superb novel that will leave you thinking hard about life for a long time afterwards, and there's not much higher praise than that.
