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"What's happened?"
"Nora."
"Right."
"She lit out."
"Sorry to hear it. Who's Nora?"
"The love of my life."
I said it before, there is nothing scientific about literature. So my admiration of Ray Banks' previous titles GUN and DEAD MONEY was difficult to put in clear terms. Something about his approach to characters hit my wavelength, in a spot well beyond aesthetic appreciation. The way they lived and thought about existence reflected things I have went through and things I'm still going through now. It's a coincidence if I picked up WOLF TICKETS soon after martial artist Nick Diaz made the term popular again. The book had been in my TBR pile forever and I just came around to it. Ray Banks actually fathered the term for me in 2010 when WOLF TICKETS was being first published as a serial in NEEDLE Magazine. As usual, when dealing with the crazy Scot literature, expect the unexpected.
Sean Farrell and Jimmy Cobb served in the British Army together. Like many veterans, they live on the fringe of society. Farrell though, made a sincere attempt at going legit when he met Nora, the woman of his dreams. His dreams all go to hell one morning when Nora leaves him, taking with her his favorite leather jacket and 20K of his money and left him with her Dido record. That morning the old Farrell washes over the newfound good boy and does the one thing left to do, he goes after Nora to get his money back and get his vengeance over the woman who betrayed him. He calls his old friend Cobb in Newcastle to help him out, because there is a lot more at stake than a puny twenty large. Nora is going after everything Sean has.
WOLF TICKETS comes out of the gates roaring like a getaway Camaro. For the first five or six chapters, the book burned my hands with its great content. Farrell is a heartbroken alpha male. I mean, how much does it happen in literature, let alone crime fiction? That's so cool. My main problem with the novella is that it offers the premise of a personal grudge story between a jilted lover and his elusive ex and then it gets derivative. Things happen and the reader is steered away from this seducing idea. I wouldn't have any quarrel if the derivative events would have been cooler than the Sean Vs Nora thing. The story of the alpha male and the Dido record gets brushed aside for something a lot less original, a gangster scuffle about disappearing money.
Sean Farrell and Jimmy Cobb served in the British Army together. Like many veterans, they live on the fringe of society. Farrell though, made a sincere attempt at going legit when he met Nora, the woman of his dreams. His dreams all go to hell one morning when Nora leaves him, taking with her his favorite leather jacket and 20K of his money and left him with her Dido record. That morning the old Farrell washes over the newfound good boy and does the one thing left to do, he goes after Nora to get his money back and get his vengeance over the woman who betrayed him. He calls his old friend Cobb in Newcastle to help him out, because there is a lot more at stake than a puny twenty large. Nora is going after everything Sean has.
WOLF TICKETS comes out of the gates roaring like a getaway Camaro. For the first five or six chapters, the book burned my hands with its great content. Farrell is a heartbroken alpha male. I mean, how much does it happen in literature, let alone crime fiction? That's so cool. My main problem with the novella is that it offers the premise of a personal grudge story between a jilted lover and his elusive ex and then it gets derivative. Things happen and the reader is steered away from this seducing idea. I wouldn't have any quarrel if the derivative events would have been cooler than the Sean Vs Nora thing. The story of the alpha male and the Dido record gets brushed aside for something a lot less original, a gangster scuffle about disappearing money.
Here was something that popped in my head - Sigmund Freud, right, once said that Irish were a race of people who'd never benefit from psychoanalysis. They were too fuckin' mental, you see. They were a lost cause.
Course, Freud was scared of ferns, so he was plenty tapped himself, but sat next to Farrell, I was beginning to think he might have a point anyway.
I'm deliberately being a dirtbag, here. By crime fiction standards, WOLF TICKETS is admirable and I don't think Ray Banks' ambitions ever were to transcend the genre. It goes into the beaten path faster and harder than most, but the problem here is not with what the novel is, it's what it could have been. Banks has this God-given ability of drawing these larger-than-life characters, these palimpsests of traditional crime fiction characters and yet the plot of WOLF TICKETS appeal to only one layer of their complex and engaging personality. Don't get me wrong, this is unfair criticism, I'm well-aware of that. It's not Ray Banks' job to transcend crime fiction if he doesn't want to. What I'm trying to say here is that WOLF TICKETS had the power to and it didn't. So the literature dweeb in me was a little disappointed.
Ray Banks is often called "the Godfather of Brit Grit" and it sounds about right. He is a master of that particular blend of crime fiction with terrifc, yet oh-so-British characters, who are as important as the story they're starring in. He's one of these writers I'll never get tired of reading and just reading WOLF TICKETS prompted me to buy his subsequent serial MATADOR that looks even bolder and more "out there" than what he's written before. In the big picture, I recommend WOLF TICKETS to crime fiction fanatics who are hurting for wonderful characters and for that dark and violent world that Ray Banks created that is so hardcore that cops don't even show their faces!
THREE STARS