Country: Scotland
Genre: Noir
Pages: 44
I've been looking to get into Allan Guthrie. He is a major influence for many noir writers of the information age. I was questioning my pals Heath Lowrance and Paul D. Brazill about where to start with Guthrie, and the man himself stepped in and steered me towards his eBook novellas. In this case, his latest work, Bye Bye Baby. I knew I was reading material of exceptional quality as my eyes couldn't leave the page, the sound of my workplace began to fade out and my to-do list for the day went right out the window. Reading Allan Guthrie is that kind of experience, where you're chained to the page until you hit the last word. And whenever you're done, you want to start another.
Bye Bye Baby is a novella, but considering its short length, it could be called "a very long short story". The boundaries between both formats were never clear anyway, but Bye Bye Baby reads like a novel. It sure packs the scope and the sucker punches that many three hundred pages novels lack. It's the story of Frank Collins, a Scottish police officer sent on a strange by his superior, concerning an woman who's son disappeared. At first, Mrs. Wilson looks like the typical heartbroken victim, but there is more to this case than meets the eye. Soon enough, Collins will start unfolding the layers and cursing his boss for sending him in that kind of case that no cop right in his mind would want a part of.
On a mechanical aspect, Bye Bye Baby is brilliant. Its pace is clockwork regular, but the short nature of the story make it unbearably fast. Just when you think you hold the culprit, you're getting thrown in a complete other direction by the insertion of a new element. The characters are colorful and memorable. You will fall in love with the confused wife Holly, the grouchy Uncle James and the asshole Dutton. They are a bit of a caricature, which might throw off some readers, but they sure make for a lively workplace. Plus, the crime Collins is trying to solve gets so complex and twisted, so fast, that you keep a balance between the foul mouthed humor and the difficult, yet not impossible puzzle of finding the blackmailer. Plus, like a maestro, Guthrie leaves some elements out of the story for you to figure out.
The last time I have read sometimes with such voracity, I was discovering Dennis Lehane. Bye Bye Baby might be really short, but it's also very cheap. Allan Guthrie also had the delicacy to put in the original short story that lead to the novella as well as little historical background. The characters he created around the disappearance of a ghost can seem a little cliché sometimes, but noir has a thing for the judicious use of cliché. Plus, I do not doubt that given a little more pages to sprawl upon, they would gain a depth that rivals the works of Lehane. I'm glad that the work of Allan Guthrie live up to his mythical online reputation. Bye Bye Baby is one of those stories that bind people together. You will discuss it for hours around the table with fellow readers and a couple of pints.