In No More Heroes, Cal Innes is working for Donald Innes, a slum landlord, handing out eviction notices to non-paying tenants. He’s still addicted to painkillers, and still drinking too much, and he’s given up on the PI business, despite the fact that his best friend Paulo wants him to start up again. When he notices a fire in a house he’s trying to serve an eviction on he runs inside and rescues a boy from the blaze, not realising that the grandmother is still inside. The press declares him a local hero, even though he doesn’t feel he’s anything of the sort. He decides to quit serving notices for Plummer after this incident but is surprised to find that his old boss wants to hire him to look into the cause of the fire, which he thinks is down to a white nationalist party. The case leads him to check up on the nationalists, but what he finds out threatens to bring about both his death and riots and destruction to the streets of Manchester.
In Beast of Burden, Cal is dealing with the aftermath of the what happened in No More Heroes, which has left him a physical and emotional wreck. He’s dealing with family troubles and other problems when Morris Tiernan gets in contact and asks him to find his son, Mo, who has mysteriously gone missing. Despite the fact that Cal and Mo had some serious words at the end of Sucker Punch, Cal takes the job and decides to use it to get even with the Tiernan family, who he blames for all the problems that have plagued him since the job in Newcastle. At the same time Detective Sergeant Iain ‘Donkey’ Donkin is looking to pin anything he can find on Innes, who he sees as a typical criminal and somebody who deserves to go back inside. But Donkin has his own troubles too, considering he has an estranged wife and daughter and a suspension from duty to deal with, so when Cal finds Mo and the case becomes a suspicious death, Donkin sees this as his opportunity to take down Innes and some of his foes on the force. Meanwhile, Innes works on a tricky plot to destroy the Tiernans, risking life and limb to do it.
Anybody who has read my reviews of Saturday’s Child and Sucker Punch, the first two novels in the Cal Innes tetralogy, will know how highly I rate these books. They’re dark, funny, and capture the nervous rhythms of modern British speech better than most novels I’ve encountered recently. And if you’ve read my reviews and not read them yet, then shame on you. You should read them. You really should. Parts three and four are much darker affairs, taking the Innes story to its natural but still shocking conclusion. Taken as novels in their own right, these tales are genuinely top-tier, but taken as a quartet Banks’ achievement is a huge one. Innes is easily one of the finest British PIs ever created and this series is easily one of the finest to emerge from these shores. Throughout the series, Cal Innes grows into a man who, for all his faults, is a genuine hero. He might not be happy about being forced into that position, but when there’s nobody else for the task he risks life and limb to ultimately do the right thing, even when it costs him.
Seriously, if you’re reading this and you haven’t considered buying any of this series then I pity you, because you’re denying yourself a genuinely powerful reading experience. Highly recommended.
