That's a serious beanie hat you got there, Doug.
Country: U.K
Genre: Hardboiled
Pages: 170/281 kb
I was heading home, to Ayr. To names and places I know. To Wallace Tower. To Burns Statue Square. To Cromwell's Citadel. The town had a history, much farther reaching than my own, but there was some of it we shared. Those years of my boyhood, my schooling, and the few early years of adulthood when I decided there was more to see beyond the limitations and bournes I'd grown so used to.
There is an inescapable reality to reading genre fiction. You have to accept being fed the same five or six stories over and over again. Crime fiction classics include: the disappearing girl, the disappearing/murdered child, the heist/score gone wrong, serial killer on the loose and misguided youth gets in over his head with organized crime. That's fine, really. They are genre tropes and the writers who build the most original stories around these core elements will get the most success. There are the odd original tropes (Chuck Palahniuk is good at this), but it's not the norm. Tony Black's novella THE STORM WITHOUT is a particularly satisfying spin on classic crime fiction tropes. While its elements couldn't be any more conventional, Black attacks them from all the wrong angles, resulting in a beautiful, lyrical piece of literature about a detective, slowly burning out.
You will want to pay a beer to protagonist Doug Michie before page five and that feeling will only grow stronger as THE STORM WITHOUT unfolds. He was sacked from his detective job in the city not long ago and without anywhere to go or anything planned, he moves back to his hometown of Ayr. Over there, he is almost magnetically drawn to his old days girlfriend Lyn, who looks anxious and lost. The fundamental trust between them being still strong, Lyn soon confides to Doug what's wrong. Her son Glenn is currently in custody of the police, for the murder of his girlfriend Kirstie. Lyn doesn't believe he was capable of murder and as Doug scrapes the surface of this case, he'll find out that nobody else does. Not even the victim's parents seem convinced about the conviction. His cop sense tingle and he is brought back into action, investigating on his own, for his old friend. For old time's sake.
Part of what makes THE STORM WITHOUT so involving, is its strong, but melancholic narrator. He creates an immediate sense of intimacy and a bizarre feeling that he investigates Kirstie Donald's murder for personal motives, first and foremost. Tony Black crafted a strong sense of relationship between Doug and his hometown of Ayr, with an invisible dread lingering. Obviously, he didn't leave in good terms (although those terms are never mentioned), but since his present failed him also, he's looking to repair something with his past. Doug is looking for redemption, but not solely in the eyes of a woman. You never get the sense that Doug investigates for Lyn, but more for the old days, to keep a memory of a time and of himself alive. He wants something he can't get by investigation this murder. Repair something that's been broken. That sense of loss and dread makes THE STORM WITHOUT come alive like few books do. This all lies in Tony Black's well-studied prose, rather than his themes or storyline.
There was something about driving at night; it lured you into an altered sense of reality. I planted the foot, shot up the '77. The car felt like a capsule rocketing into space. The road ahead was an illusion of light-trails. Twisting, bending beams that stretched out like fireworks then suddenly sheared off with a tilt of the wheel.
There seems to be a new trend in detective story, which THE STORM WITHOUT is a part of. Since Hollywood (and the internet age in general) has murdered general interest the dark and twisted people stories (you can find this type of people everywhere now), the new thing seems to be normal people with dark and twisted motivations. Tony Black's novella finds its cozy spot in that category. It really thrives on this tiny line in between local people, small towns, close relationships and this unsuspected underworld in places where everybody knows each other. Maybe it hit a stronger chord with me because I come from such a place, but it was so meticulously set up by Tony Black. The Scottish writer is a perfectionist and THE STORM WITHOUT's economical and underplayed form is really doing his writing justice.
To give you a clear point of reference, Tony Black's THE STORM WITHOUT is alike to Lawrence Block's Scudder novels, with a lyrical spin to it. You get the same sense of isolation and and inherent self-loathing as for the iconic sleuth, but they take a bigger place in Doug Michie and that's what makes him stand out so much. Amazon's lists THE STORM WITHOUT as being "the first Doug Michie crime thriller", so the tortured detective is bound to come back, which makes me a very, very happy reader. It's hardboiled fiction that everybody can appreciate, because it banks on its good writing more than its clever usage of the genre tropes. Tony Black is living up to Hammett, Chandler and Block, with his unique spin on detective fiction. He writes profoundly engrossing literature that explores the boundaries of genre and speaks to you as an intelligent being.*
FOUR STARS
* I have read the eBook version of THE STORM WITHOUT, which has different cover. I feel compelled to say it, because J.T Lindroos' cover looks better than this one. But that bloke with a beanie hat represents Doug Michie so well, I just had to show you. It's uglier, sure. But it works so well within the confines of the story, I had to choose it. But I had to mention, out of respect for Lindroos and his publisher Blasted Heath, that its their product I have read and it looks aesthetically better.
