Country: U.K
Genre: Crime
Pages: 320
I'd been so damn scared, I wanted to banish any thought that kept me from putting at lest three hundred long miles between myself and Vitaly but I couldn't help myself because I knew I had to help her.
What's cool about British crime writers is that they have their own thing going. They don't read like anybody else and yet, you can recognize them right off the page without naming locations or using local lingo. The Brits share maybe the strongest national flavor in crime fiction. Howard Linskey's THE DROP doesn't stray from that rule. Mixing marginal lifestyle, sharp humor and keen streetwise, his novel just has that British thing to it. While I can't say THE DROP has the strongest individuality, it didn't deter from my enjoyment of the novel. It borrows ideas from the genre's culture, but it never borrows material. THE DROP won't put you through new situations, but the world it has created around tried-and-true crime tropes is an interesting, lively one. For a debut novel, it would be unfair to demand more than a well-wrapped, dynamic narrative. In this regard, THE DROP delivers. It doesn't go beyond that, though.
The story of David Blake will echo other readings, I'm sure. He's small time career criminal, working for local mobster Bobby Mahoney. That's the way it always been since childhood for him, life on the fringes of society. David loves his life to a certain extent. Until his man Geordie Cartwright disappears with the drop money. That's a hole in Bobby's pocket that David has to stitch up. He embarks on a desperate hunt to find his boss' cash and every hint he collects leads him to a more unpleasant discovery than the previous one. On the bloody dollar trail he's following, Bobby finds Sarah, Bobby's absurdly hot daughter who's had a crush on him since she was anything but legal. Will she be an asset or a liability? That's just one of the many complications David has to face to right the wrongs and get the goddamn money back where it belongs.
THE DROP is one of those "everyone's after the vanished suitcase full of money" novels. While I don't think I can ever grow tired of this trope, it's not without its pitfalls. Unless you come up with the craziest, most innovative ideas, it has to be a very character driven novel for it to work. In this case, THE DROP is too ambitious. David's a great lead, but the infernal pace and the constant flow of new places, new characters and new information are making his interactions a little tame. Support characters like Finney, Bobby, Vitaly and even Sarah felt restrained by the high number of variables David had to keep dealing with. There is potential left unexplored in these characters and that made the criminal lifestyle in THE DROP sound a little generic.
Finney was famous for his powers of persuation, his trademark weapon of choice being a nail gun. He had a fondness for putting nail through people's hands, leaving them stuck to their kitchen tables, garage doors and, in one memorable case, the skull of a deceased accomplice.
Where THE DROP ultimately succeeds (it's flawed, but it is a good novel) is through Linskey's very judicious use of first person narration. The perspective given by David's collapsing universe is both unique and fun. Geordie Cartwright's disappearance acts as a virus on his seemingly healthy lifestyle and I took a vicious pleasure in seeing every aspect of David's life catch the cooties. He was being borderline complacent as a gangster before shit hit the fan and Linskey creates a really cool character arc around David's reexamination of his own life and choices. There will be a sequel to his adventures called THE DAMAGE, coming up next September and THE DROP left me on the fence about it. It was a decent enough read. Didn't satisfy my need for extremes, but if you're into Brit Grit (like my friend Paul D. Brazill would say), Howard Linskey is a name to keep on your radar.
THREE STARS