Book Review: Saturday's Child - Ray Banks

"Your mind will find another, and that's where the days have gone, and all you can hear is a stereo somewhere playing a pig of a song."

Before we go any further, you should know that I'm not, generally speaking, a big fan of crime fiction. James Lee Burke? Sure. Anyone that knows me will tell you I'll read anything with the kind of loping, lyrical prose that Burke trades in. Elmore Leonard? Naturally. I'm more confused by people who don't enjoy a writer with that kind of gift for character and dialogue. But these are exceptions where a reader like me is concerned, popular talents that transcend the genre. When I look at crime fiction from my ignorant point of view, I see an awful lot of mediocre writers churning out formulaic dross I wouldn't dream of wasting my time on. I'm well aware that this is almost certainly not the case. My point is that I don't have the necessary love of the genre to go digging for diamonds in a pile of shit.

And so to noir. Brit-noir, if you want to whip out the labels and get specific. We could, I'm sure, initiate an endless discussion as to what noir is and what it entails, but for the purposes of this review, 'Brit-noir' is the black coffee to the traditional British crime novel's milky tea, and a genre defined by cynical characters, bleak settings, and all manner of unpleasantness. It doesn't deal in heroes and happy endings, instead inhabiting a world where morals come in shades of grey and the best choice is sometimes the lesser of two evils.

Which brings us nicely to Cal Innes, the protagonist of Saturday's Child. Innes is an ex-con with a murky past working as a self-styled PI in some of the more sordid parts of Manchester. When local gangster 'Uncle' Morris Tiernan asks Innes to track down an errant casino employee on the run with a hefty chunk of money, he has little choice but to take the job. The trail leads to Newcastle, where Cal learns some unpleasant truths about the Tiernans when he comes into conflict with Morris's pill-popping psycho of a son, Mo. With a case wrapped in moral dilemmas to resolve, everyone involved apparently after his blood, and more than enough problems of his own, Innes has his hands full, and a date with some unpleasant truths about himself never seems far away.

Let's not fuck around here, Saturday's Child is one bleak bastard of a novel. If you're looking for redemption, resolution, and a world where you're ultimately sure the sun's going to come up in the morning, there's not much here for you. From first to last, this particular chapter of the Cal Innes story is relentlessly downbeat, the darkness punctuated only by some neatly timed bursts of black humour. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and Banks never makes a big deal out of it. Cal's voice and view are dark, yes, but never to the point of parody. There's a dry wit and a matter-of-fact boredom with it all at work in Cal's part of the narrative, and that's enough, I think, to carry the less cynical reader through.

The addition of the semi-coherent, borderline psychotic Mo as a second narrator is a bold step on the author's part, and one I wasn't sure he was going to get away with in the early going. But, while there are still a few moments where I felt Mo was making synaptic leaps he probably shouldn't have been capable of making, and at least one rather suave metaphor I couldn't begin to imagine the lad coming up with, it does work. This is mostly because, in narrative terms, the inside of Mo's head is an almost comically obscene and violent counterpoint to Cal's more considered thoughts. That said, Banks does eventually elicit a degree of pity from the reader for the younger Tiernan, and you never feel that his viewpoint is unnecessary or contrived.

The same can be said for Saturday's Child as a whole. There's a good bit more meat on this than there was on Banks's debut, The Big Blind, but very little in the way of fat. The cover blurb from Russel McLean describes it as 'dirty, hard and fast', and that's about as accurate a description as you're going to find.

Criticisms? Just a couple. Firstly, I've already noted that Banks is most comfortable when he's in the well-worn shoes of Callum Innes. With that in mind, it's worth pointing out that the women in this man's world come off sketchy and underwritten. Even the flimsiest of the male characters comes complete with motive, mood, and colour. The ladies are not so fortunate. Whether some of that is deliberate (Banks is, at times, clearly poking fun at the noir cliche) isn't for me to say, but it's certainly noticeable. Secondly, it does all get a bit much at times. We've come far enough for you to be sure I'm going to tell you that Saturday's Child is an entertaining and well-written book, but there are times when you find yourself really wishing that Banks would ease up on Innes for just a minute and give him a chance to win one. It seems that everything the protagonist does, no matter how noble his intention, gets turned around on the poor fucker. I'm not the kind of reader who thinks everything is clear cut and the hero should be a hero and always win, but Innes never seems to catch a break. Ever. In those terms, I think this may well be the harshest thing I've read in years.

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly for a word-junkie like me, you should read this book for the wonderful things Banks does with prose and dialect. Whether it's playing off hard-boiled PI cliches or climbing inside the drug-addled heads of scally scum looking for trouble, Saturday's Child is never more than a few paragraphs from a sentence or a turn of phrase that'll leave you smiling, grimacing, or just watching in awe as Banks paints graphic pictures with so few words it's occasionally startling. It isn't always graceful - sometimes it's downright brutal - but it's clearly a labour of love and, perhaps most importantly, no little talent.

As I said at the start, I don't know a whole hell of a lot about the crime genre, and I'm at a loss when it comes to any in-depth discussion of what constitutes noir. I do know a thing or two about writing, though, and I do know that Saturday's Child now comes with an official NFADR recommendation for anybody that thinks they're hard enough. Anyone who doesn't is free to go and sip their milky tea over a Ruth Rendell. Wankers.