‘A Serpent Uncoiled’ – Simon Spurrier (Headline)

I’m a guy who’s lucky enough to have a large pile of books constantly on hand whenever I fancy something new to read; the best position to be in if you love reading like I do :o) These days, my reading list chops and changes depending on my mood (and if I’ve promised someone that I’ll read a particular book) and you’re likely to find that my choice of reading is either dependant on pot luck or what’s closest to hand (or is that just the same thing...?) Sometimes though, a review appears online that makes me abandon this haphazard approach and go straight for my own copy, wherever it might sit in the pile. A review like this one in fact.

I’d been feeling a little burnt out, on my usual fare, and fancied something a little different to read; the ‘Pornokitsch’ review came along at just the right time for me, promising a read that looked like it had plenty of meat on it but was perhaps a different flavour to what I’d normally pick up. I don’t read many crime novels (hardly any in fact) so that might explain why ‘A Serpent Uncoiled’ didn’t work for me in the same way that it did for others. I’m not sure that’s the whole reason though...

Dan Shaper used to work as a ‘fixer’ for one of London’s leading crime families until a catastrophic breakdown reduced him to his current state, working freelance and staving off the brewing insanity through an intuitively administered dose of internet purchased anti-psychotic medication. Shaper can’t let himself get too used to the medication (in case his body develops an immunity) so undergoes regular ‘detox’ sessions in the safety of his own flat, locked away from the demands of the outside world. His latest session is about to be interrupted though and the race is on to solve a case before his mind falls to pieces...
George Glass has just been told that he’s on a list of people being killed off one by one, seemingly random killings connected by one horrifying forensic detail. Glass cannot remember what he might have done to end up on such a list but that’s understandable, your mind play funny tricks when you’re three thousand years old... Shaper is the only person Glass can trust to solve this case but can Shaper trust his own failing mind to carry him over the finishing line...?

‘A Serpent Uncoiled’ sets itself up with an intriguing premise. From my own admittedly limited experience there’s usually some kind of race against time in books like this, generally revolving around having to solve the case before someone else dies, another valuable item is stolen and so on. It’s not often though that the guy pressed into solving the case finds himself in a race against time with himself. In ‘A Serpent Uncoiled’ the actual crimes being committed (grotesque as they are) find themselves playing second fiddle to the big question being posed. Dan Shaper is in no fit state to take the case on to begin with and it’s pushing him into places where he is most definitely not comfortable at all. How much longer can Shaper survive being pushed closer and closer towards the edge and will he go over...?

This is a premise that really caught my eye and Shaper is enough of a mixed up character (looking for redemption but doing it on the wrong side of the law) that you want to follow him through the plot and see how he does. You’re certainly left in no doubt what could happen if Shaper’s mental state goes past the point of no return.
Where things fell down for me was that it felt like Spurrier went a little too easy on Shaper and perhaps missed a chance to really push the boundaries and see how Shaper took it. Don’t get me wrong, there are some moments where you’re given a clear picture as to what is going on inside Shaper’s head (and I’m talking about the bit where Shaper comes out of an ‘episode’ to find that he is driving his van with no idea as to how he got there in the first place). Shaper’s hallucinations are also beautifully described (as much as maggots and rotting flesh can be ‘beautiful’...) and the nature of the story has you wondering whether certain of these hallucinations are in fact real. This device is a great way of getting you right into the plot and making you really think about what is going on.
For each of these moments though, there are at least two more where the ‘edge’ is either pushed back or you’re shown that Shaper’s head is actually better equipped to deal with it than we thought. To me, it almost felt like I’d been cheated a little. If, for the most part, Shaper can deal with his issues then it’s not really a race against time... is it? Any tension that had built up dropped away for me when I realised this and I settled into a routine of watching Shaper encounter the occasional mental curveball but recover nicely.

It’s a good job then that the question of the murders was a little more engaging. Spurrier comes up with a list of compelling reasons why any one of a number of people could be the killer and then leaves Shaper to try and find the one who actually did it. The beautiful thing is that Spurrier lets you know who the killer is within the first couple of chapters but it’s so subtly done that only hindsight will reveal it. The rest of the plot is a morass of dead ends and false clues that somehow all come together to form a seedy picture of London’s underworld, punctuated with the kind of violence that you would expect from such a setting. It’s a plot that flows very smoothly and is full of the kind of questions that keep you reading.

While there’s no doubt that ‘A Serpent Uncoiled’ kept a keen hold on my attention it didn’t quite match up to its own self-proclaimed intentions. It was a gripping read but, at the same time, a book that felt like it could have been a whole lot more. Having said that though, I’ll be keeping an eye open for more for Simon Spurrier.

Eight out of Ten

‘The City & The City’ – China Mieville (Pan MacMillan)

Pretty much all of my reading is either fantasy, science fiction or horror but every now and then I like to break out and go for something completely different. This can sometimes backfire spectacularly (the Mills & Boon experiment was doomed to failure right from the start...) but more often than not I find something that I really get into. Raymond Chandler’s ‘Philip Marlowe’ books were one of these finds and I loved the mixture of atmospheric mean streets and a hero who didn’t know what he had got himself into but was just trying to do the right thing. I love finding noir tales like these in fantasy (one of the reasons I got into ‘Nights of Villjamur’ the way I did) and I was really excited to hear that China Mieville was writing something along these lines. I’ve been a big fan of his, ever since ‘Perdido Street Station’, and was keen to see what he had come up with. One of the things I’ve found out about Mieville’s work is that it’s never quite what you expect and this was certainly the case for ‘The City & The City’...

Inspector Tyador Borlu has come across more than his fair share of dead bodies in his work for the Extreme Crime Squad, in the Eastern European city of Beszel, but there is a lot more to this latest case than he realises. The murder of a student shouldn’t lead to mysterious phone calls and interference from those who should be helping him... As Borlu continues his investigations it becomes clear that they are leading him to the one city on Earth that is as strange as his own, a border unlike any other will take him into the city of Ul Qoma and face to face with some startling revelations...

Other reviewers have mentioned an embargo around the concept underpinning ‘The City & The City’, I’m not sure if this is still in place (as the book should be out by now) but I’m going avoid going into it in too much detail so as not to spoil it for those who don’t already know. Suffice it to say that I think that it’s a really clever idea that’s handled very well over the course of the book regarding the situations that it brings up and the things that it gets you thinking about. I’ve never seen a chase scene written in quite such a manner (as it was in ‘The City & The City’) and the unique circumstances add a level of real tension to the scene. Borlu is in danger on more than one level and this is made abundantly clear. The unique way in which the villain seeks to avoid capture (right at the very end) is brilliant and really left me hanging on for the conclusion.

Adam, over at The Wertzone, had an issue with the book in that he says that “neither the world nor humanity at large operate in the way that Mieville needs them to for the conceit to work”. I can see where he’s coming from but I guess what I’d say is that the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma (and their inhabitants) operate in exactly the way they need to for Mieville’s conceit to work. The setting may be contemporary but it’s really only a background to what is being played out in the cities themselves.
The problem I did have though was that there was nothing to suggest what had caused Beszel and Ul Qoma to be the way that they were. I could buy into the fact that they had to behave in a certain way, towards each other, but the way in which this was executed really needed to be underpinned by something outlining why this had come to pass. This niggled at me, a bit, but there were plenty of other things going on that more than made up for this.

‘The City & The City’ may be all about the situations arising from it’s central concept but it’s also a detective story (set against contrasting European cities) that kept me guessing the whole way through by throwing up questions that kept me reading. There’s also a real energy apparent in Borlu’s relentless pursuit of the truth and it’s infectious, I wanted to find out the truth just as much as he did! Mieville may have written a contemporary detective novel but he hasn’t ignored his fantasy roots and this is evident in the conspiracy theories that decorate the streets of Beszel and Ul Qoma, adding another layer of friction and paranoia to cities that already have more than their fair share. It’s a good mix and the beauty is that it all makes sense when the reader is given the whole picture right at the end of the book. The plot may be slow and methodical but it’s deliberately so, Mieville takes great care to make sure that everything fits together. The only piece that is missing (for me) is what led to Beszel and Ul Qoma being the way they are...

‘The City & The City’ is an engrossing detective novel that is unmistakably China Mieville in every sense. I’m not sure that it’s my favourite of his books but there’s enough there for ‘The City and The City’ to stand proudly alongside everything else that he’s written.

Nine and a Quarter out of Ten

‘The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death’ – Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books)

When I first moved to London I took on a temp job updating, and closing down, files of people that had died in a particular London Borough and the local council were winding up their affairs. At least that’s what I thought at the time... It turned out that not only would I be looking at files but I would also be going into the houses of the (very) recently deceased to look for details of next of kin etc. One very hot July day, I was called upon to go into the house of a man who had been dead for about three weeks before anyone noticed the strange smell coming from his house, without a doubt the worst day of my working life... Reading ‘The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death’ gave me a real sense of déjà vu...

Charlie Huston has become one of a select group of authors where I will put down whatever I am currently reading to check out his latest book. This is primarily because of his excellent ‘Joe Pitt’ series but ‘The Shotgun Rule’ is also more than worth your time if you like crime fiction with a more than liberal dose of attitude. ‘Mystic Arts’ isn’t without its problems but its well worth a look...

A particularly traumatic event leads Webster Goodhue to quit his job as a teacher and swear never to ride the bus again. However, there’s only so much time anyone can reasonably get away with living rent free with your best friend and doing your level best to drive away all your other friends, it’s time Webster found himself a job. As luck would have it an opening suddenly appear with Clean Team, the people the police call if a stray dog has been hit by a train or a suicide ends up not being a clean cut as the victim intended. Soon enough, Webster finds himself knee deep in the excesses of humanity’s lowest moment but things are about to get worse still. Trauma cleaning is a booming industry and rival companies are not above a little sabotage in order to steal the trade. And then there’s the midnight call Webster gets from a client who has some ‘extra cleaning work’, in a motel, which she needs him to do for her. Where there’s a midnight rendezvous in a blood splattered motel room, gun toting cowboys will surely follow. What has Webster got himself into? And will he ever get himself out...?

‘The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death’ is one of those books that grabs you right from the first page and keeps a hold long after you’ve finished, that’s certainly what happened for me. The novel is brimming with a nervous energy that keeps the plot flowing and perfectly complements a cast of characters that are either on the wrong side of tracks or are teetering on the edge (numerous fire bombings, beatings and death by telephone should help you work out who’s who!) The story is told entirely from Webster’s perspective and Huston deftly treads a fine line between eliciting the reader’s sympathy, for a genuinely tortured soul, and making us wish that Webster would just shut the hell up and stop hurting the people who are trying to help him. As a result, Webster comes across as a well rounded character whose wisecracks very much maintain the reader’s interest over the course of the book.

‘The Mystic Arts’ sees Huston continue to write in that sparse (yet very intense) style where every word looks to have been carefully chosen for its place on the page. Not a word is wasted in a book that weighs in at a relatively slender three hundred and nineteen pages. However, as much as I enjoyed the book, I was left wishing that Huston had given himself a little more room to breathe and explore some of the supporting characters, showing us what makes them tick. We do get to find out more about Soledad, Webster’s midnight assignation, but only because the plot demands that everything be tied up satisfactorily (which it is, no doubt about that). The laconic Gabe is another character who is almost begging to have his story told. Sometimes it’s nice to find out more about certain characters (even if you don’t really need to) but, to be fair, Huston appears to be holding to the fact that you don’t always get the whole picture in real life...

‘Real life’ is certainly a term that can be applied to the events of ‘The Mystic Arts’. Shit happens and it often happens in a completely random way that no-one could have possibly foreseen. It’s like a comedy of errors but with the comedy taken out and replaced with the aforementioned fire bombings, beatings and death by telephone. I have to say though that I wasn’t too sure about what lay at the heart of the ‘Soledad plot’, people can place importance on the most unlikely things in real life but I was left wondering if perhaps Huston could have picked something better to smuggle than... I’ll leave you to find that out.

Despite this, ‘The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death’ is Huston staying firmly on top of his game. I reckon fans will love it and if you’re not a fan then this may be the book that converts you.

Nine out of Ten