Category Archives: novella

Review: Mr Suit by Nigel Bird

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Liza is a gangster’s wife who has tired of taking care of her husband Archie, who has been suffering from Locked-In- Syndrome due to a kidnapping that went badly wrong (for him at least). She asks Mr Suit, the crime boss who accidentally shot Archie, to put him out of his misery. He does as he’s told, but various complications, such as Archie suddenly remembering where he’s hidden the proceeds of the kidnapping, result in the world’s slowest getaway, in a canal boat along Regent’s Canal, but events soon catch up with Liza and she’s forced into a showdown with Mr Suit and his henchmen.

Mr Suit is a bit of a departure for Nigel Bird, whose short collection Dirty Old Town rather impressed me last year. It’s a blackly comic noir tale with barely a likeable character in sight (they’re all trying to get one over on each other) and its tongue firmly in its cheek. This novella is short and snappy and good fun while it lasts. It isn’t as deep or layered as many of Bird’s shorts, but it races along brightly and will definitely keep you glued to your Kindle for its short duration. Highly recommended.

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Review: Fuckin’ Lie Down Already by Tom Piccirilli

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As the story begins, Clay, a New York detective, is pretty close to the end. His family have been murdered and he has been gut shot and left for dead by a junkie hitman hired by a mob boss who Clay was investigating. The problem for the junkie and the mob boss is that they didn’t finish the job. Despite the fact that his entire digestive system seems to be coming out through the holes in his abdomen, Clay packs the corpses of his wife and son in the family car and sets off on a journey of no return to get revenge on the men who’ve crossed him.

That synopsis pretty much sums up the entirety of Piccirilli’s tight, lean and gruelling revenge novella, which discards most of the set-up that would usually be put in place in the usual run-of-the-mill revenge tale and turns it into back story. As a consequence, what it lacks in characterisation it more than makes up for in velocity and ferocity, speeding along like an out-of-control express train. It’s a visceral tale, for sure – Piccirilli paints a grim picture of what is happening to the protagonist’s innards – but so cleanly and clearly executed that even the most squeamish readers will be riveted to their seats. It is superbly written and comes highly recommended.

Review: Fierce Bitches by Jedidiah Ayres

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Anybody who read my recent review of Ayres’ collection A F*ckload of Shorts will know I thought highly of it. And rumblings on the crime fiction grapevine suggested that his latest, Fierce Bitches, was a cracker. Reviews were exceptional right across the board. So I made sure to grab a paperback copy the moment it became available.

Fierce Bitches involves a small town, or more a collection of buildings really, called Politoburg, in the middle of nowhere in Mexico that belongs to Harlan Polito, a crime boss. The population of this town consists of Mexican whores (the Marias), gringos who work for Polito (sent out of the way, to be called on when the boss needs them), and Ramon who runs the place by keeping gringos in line – making sure they don’t hurt the girls, keeping them supplied with booze, drugs etc, and breaking heads when needs be. Everything runs smoothly, or as smoothly as a town that consists of criminals can, until a robbery of a delivery occurs, leaving people dead and Ramon severely injured. In the aftermath of the robbery one of the Marias escapes with a nameless gringo and suddenly everything goes to hell…

It’s hard to know how to classify Fierce Bitches. It’s not strictly crime fiction, although crimes obviously occur during it (lots of them, in fact), I suppose you could call it noir, it’s certainly bleak enough, but even that doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It has many elements in the mix, but the best way to describe it would be as a cross between the hellish El Rey finale of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway and the biblical fury of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. One thing is for certain, it has an ambition that most modern noir writers don’t (and probably can’t) approach. For a start, the use of language is certainly superior to many writers currently working in this field. Second-person narration is notoriously difficult to get right but Ayres absolutely nails it here. Also, the fractured timeline mode of storytelling is another skill that’s not easy to nail, but again Ayres manages it with aplomb. It’s an exceptional bit of writing that, despite only being novella length, feels much weightier than its page count and has certainly marked Ayres as someone who will probably rise to the top of the current crop of crime/noir writers sooner rather than later. I can see this being in my top ten or top five or whatever the fuck it ends up being at the end of the year.

Review: The Storm Without by Tony Black

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According to the blurbs, Tony Black is apparently Irvine Welsh’s favourite crime writer. This is no small thing to have on your resume, that one of the most influential writers of the last thirty years thinks you’re the mutt’s nuts when it comes to writing crime fiction.

Black has made his name writing the Gus Drury series of books, all of which come with lots of critical acclaim, so he has a pedigree with this stuff. This Blasted Heath release isn’t one of those, this one is about Doug Michie, a former RUC officer with a past, who has returned to his old home town of Ayr. He’s barely back in town five minutes when he meets an old friend, and once more than that, Lyn, whose son has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. She doesn’t believe he did it. Doug takes it on trust and starts investigating. What he finds out leads him to old enemies, smuggling and council corruption. On top of which he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and ex-colleagues who aren’t exactly happy to have him back.

The Storm Without is a brisk read with plenty of style and a compelling narrator in Doug Michie. Tony Black’s excellent prose brings the rainswept streets of Ayr alive with nice little nuggets of description and he keeps the narrative moving along nicely. So far so good. But there is one flaw, one that takes a 5-star performance and turns it into a 4-star scrape. That flaw is the ending. Without giving away spoilers there is a rescue for a certain character, but the thing is we never find out how this happens or by whom or how the character gets found. Aside from a paragraph of a newspaper article explaining that it has happened there’s no further description to explain how it happened. Okay, I know they say show don’t tell, but if you can’t show something at least tell me how something occurred – I’d rather be told something than just be forced to accept that something has happened – without an explanation it becomes a deus ex machina and feels a bit rushed. This is a pity, really, because Black can really turn a sentence and he knows his way around a narrative and in Michie he has created a genuinely complex and likeable character. Despite the flawed ending, in my humble opinion, at least, this is still a fine read, but it could have been more than that. Still, Michie is a great character and I look forward to reading more from him and Tony Black.

Review – Gun by Ray Banks

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Richie, a young criminal not long out of prison and odd-job man for Goose, a wheelchair-bound crook who claims he got his injury during the Falklands conflict, although everybody knows it was from mainlining a leg artery, is given the task of picking up a Magnum from Florida Al, a shifty hoodlum with a taste for loud shirts.

The pick-up of the gun goes relatively well, but as soon as Richie gets out on to the Leam estate he is attacked and beaten by some local kids, who take the gun from him whilst he’s unconscious.

He then goes in search of the gun with inevitably disastrous results.

Gun is a powerful novella with a nice eye for place and an excellent ear for Tyneside vernacular. It’s written in lean prose that gets on with telling the story rather than dressing the page in adverbs. The characters are believable and well-rounded, even the ones who only stray into the story for a paragraph or two, and Richie is a compelling and tragic protagonist. He’s not a bad-guy, as such, just a human being who’s judgement might be considered highly suspect.

The story unfolds at a cracking pace and, once things really start going badly, Banks expertly cranks up the tension to almost unbearable levels. If you’re a fan of gritty, urban crime fiction, you should stick this on your Kindle straightaway. It’s the kind of cracking read you can polish off on a long commute or a lazy weekend afternoon. Highly recommended.

The Hunters will be free this weekend

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In celebration of my novel The Hunters entering KDP Select, I have decided to give you lot a free-for-all from Friday 17th through Sunday 19th February.

I felt that The Hunters wasn’t getting enough exposure and thought that this would put it in the hands of a few readers. These readers will hopefully like it and tell their friends, who will, in turn, tell their friends, and everything will start to snowball. After all, there’s nothing like a bit of momentum.

And if you do grab it for free, please either post a review (it can be ultra-brief if you’re not the wordy type) or hit the Like button next to the title. Come on, you know it’s the right thing to do…

After the free-for-all has ended, the price goes up to £1.99 ($2.99) and will stay there.

That is all!

UK Edition

US Edition

Official announcement for my next novel, The Hunters

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The Hunters, the first Stanton brothers novel/novella (at nigh on 41,000 words, it’s either a large novella or a short novel), will finally be released on Kindle on the 23rd January (and as a paperback in February). It will be the beginning of a series of novellas, novels and short stories featuring these characters. They will also cross over into several other writing projects that I’m currently undertaking (one of which features Mark Kandinsky, who makes a brief but memorable cameo in The Gamblers, wherein you will find out exactly where he got his bruises from {this will mean nothing to those who haven’t read my first book}). During its first month on release, The Hunters will be on special offer at $0.99 and 99p

A short story collection entitled The Greatest Show in Town and other stories, featuring five shorts about the brothers (along with two or three other stories that don’t feature them), will appear as a Kindle exclusive in February.

A shorter novella, tentatively titled The Glasgow Grin, is well underway and should make it into release later in 2012.

On top of working as a freelance crayon monkey, so that I can earn enough to pay for my food and rent, it’s going to be a very busy year for me.

I’ve been rubbish Sorry

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Work commitments and a high degree of faffery have meant that I haven’t updated much recently and I’ve also been silent on The Hunters front… In other words, I’ve been a bit shit.

Sincere apologies.

The Hunters is almost done as an ebook – a few minor tweaks and it should be ready (barring a final check for errors, both typographical and grammatical).

It will get its Kindle debut on the 23rd of January. A paperback will make an appearance in February.

Many thanks,

Martin

No resolutions

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I’m not going to offer resolutions for 2012 on here. I try not to make proclamations like that any more; they’re rarely ever fulfilled and I usually feel bad about them afterwards.

What I will say is this. My 41,000 word novella/short novel The Hunters, the first release in my Stanton brothers series of books, will be released as an ebook in January and a paperback in either January or February (depending how quickly the layout and proofing process go). The second and third books are currently being written (one of which will be released in the final quarter of 2012). A short story collection (as yet untitled) will also be released.

Outside of that I have nothing more to add. I have other writing projects in the offing, but best not to say much more about them because I have no idea when they’ll be finalised.

Have a great New Year, readers.

Back cover blurb for The Hunters – due soon

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Here’s the back cover blurb for The Hunters, which is due in January. Hopefully it’ll give you some indication of what’s going to go down between the covers, when it arrives on your Kindle and doorstep in 2012

The Stanton brothers have their lives well mapped out. They steal money from villains and give it to… Well, themselves. They have it easy. Or they would if it wasn’t for the various scumbags who come at them with fists, knives, guns…

So when a disgruntled woman tells them about a half-million of undeclared cash in her ex-husband’s safe they think they’ve got it made. And when she tells them he runs a regular high-stakes poker game with some of Teesside’s most colourful villains they think they’ve died and gone to Heaven.

But when the job goes wrong, it turns out it’s not Heaven they’re in, but Hell. They’re left hunting the underworld for the money armed only with some well-aimed quips… and knuckledusters… and nailed-spiked baseball bats… oh, and some guns.

It’s time to get back what doesn’t belong to them…

The Hunters mixes bone-crunching action with a motley crew of Teesside villains, adds in some healthy doses of bleak black humour and serves it up at a furious pace. It would be criminal to miss it…