SATURDAY'S CHILD
Ray Banks
Publisher:
Polygon
ISBN: 1-904-598-78-1
April, 2006
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SATURDAY'S CHILD
Written by
RAY
BANKS
Blood, muck, deprivation and dark, dark humour – and that’s
just chapter one. If you like your crime gritty, absorbing and utterly
compelling, look no further than Ray Banks and his second
novel, Saturday’s Child.
Cal Innes is fresh out of Strangeways, playing PI and running from a
past muddied with ties to local gang lord 'Uncle' Morris Tiernan. When
Tiernan tells him to track down a rogue casino dealer who's absconded
with a hefty chunk of cash, Innes is thrust into a cat-and-mouse game
with Tiernan's psychotic son. Finding the thief proves potentially fatal
as the case points north to Newcastle and the sordid truth threatens to
put blood on his hands. With Tiernan's son on his tail, and a Manchester
cop determined to put Innes back on the spurs, Saturday's child definitely
has to work hard to keep living.
Writing in a style that could make the most noted of authors wince with
inadequacy, Ray Banks has created characters in Saturday’s
Child that make Hannibal Lecter look like a favourite
uncle who’s just popped around stinking of Werthers Originals.
In Callum Innes, Maurice Tiernan and his son, Mo, the true bedrocks
of good and evil – empathy and loathing – have been lashed
together, making them magnificently inseparable for the time being.
The descriptive prose that takes in
the darkened slug’s belly of two of England’s most fashionable
cities and showing those places and events that do not appear in brochures,
is at times like witnessing the aftermath of a car crash; you don’t
want to look on, but you have to. The writing at times is breathtaking
in itself and should be a source of inspiration to those aspiring to
become writers themselves. As a result, if the book is started at ten
in the morning, what has taken years for the author to painstakingly
create could easily be finished by six the same evening because the
pages won’t have stopped turning once the story has begun.
All of which is helped considerably
by fast, snappy and – above all – natural dialogue that
keeps the pace up to Formula One standards throughout, but without ever
becoming tiring. Some books have nuances in them that, at first, are
endearing but which soon become dull. Here the reader asks “would
I have said that?” and the answer, somewhat incredibly, is “Yes
…if I’d the bottle” every time.
This is a truly stunning read. Not since
Chris Simms’ Killing The Beasts for characterisation,
Mo Hayder’s Birdman for delightful, unexpected shock
value and Margaret Murphy’s The Dispossessed for descriptive
narrative has a novel been so well written. As has been mentioned here
before, occasionally when working on the coalface something of great
value drops into your lap.
Ray Banks’ Saturday’s
Child is without doubt, just such a gem.
10/10.
http://www.thesaturdayboy.com - the home of Ray Banks and Cal Innes
“Many,
many, MANY thanks for the sterling review of SC, Mr H. You make a bitter
young man extremely happy. Keep up the excellent work.”
Ray
Banks 2006
Order this book online - Linghams Booksellers
break the rules as I see fit.” - Chris High 2003.