Horses, whores and a private eye
The Dying Breed, By Declan Hughes
Saturday April 12 2008
And a mere few pages into Declan Hughes's third thriller, you could be forgiven for thinking you're reading a deliberate pastiche of Raymond Chandler: "Tyrrell was a fanatic and a bully and a snob, and my rational self despised all this, but part of me insisted on liking him, the part I had no control over, the part that drank whiskey in the morning and took the wrong woman home at night."
Here and elsewhere you feel you're in the presence of a cut-price Philip Marlowe ("She shrugged, and flicked her hair, and pouted the way she did, and I could feel my heart breaking. I'd built her into a princess, and she was just a tramp on the make"), but it's a measure of Hughes's command of plot and pacing and of his feel for character, tone and locale that you soon become absorbed in his narrative and cease to care about its hybrid origins.
Or, indeed, about the basic absurdity of its central figure, Ed Loy, a private investigator who, following in the footsteps of Marlowe, Sam Spade and Matt Scudder and all those other fantasy figures beloved of American crime writers, is permitted to confront wrongdoers and unearth dark secrets in pursuance of a truth from which he will not be distracted.
In real life, of course, scumbags aren't spilling the beans to dogged sleuths, millionaires with something to hide don't allow them into their mansions, wives and mistresses aren't constantly trying to bed them and frustrated cops don't spend half their day leaking them crucial information, but that's the tradition and Hughes embraces it with considerable panache in a story that's centred on the world of horse racing and that features clerical abuse, incest, drugs and murder among its many ingredients.
Hughes shapes all this with real skill, a good deal of wit (a solicitor Ed mistakes for a jockey is "outraged, as if I'd accused him of being a sex criminal, or a DJ"), a beady eye for local detail (a pub off the N11 is "a sprawling, anonymous car park of a place, the kind of pub you need a map to find the toilet") and a nicely caustic line in social observation ("There was a whole bunch of women hanging around that time, skinny, expensive-looking women, the kind of women who appear like thin air when there's coke around, kind of like models but not as attractive, kind of like whores but not really into the money").
I read the book in one day and greatly enjoyed it, at least until near the end when the author suddenly dispenses with first-person narrator Ed and gives us a chapter from the viewpoint of one of the main villains. This flagrant breach of storytelling rules breaks the bond between narrator and reader to such an extent that credibility drains away.
And an unconvincing last act at the races (which isn't even observed by the narrator but has to be told to him by an accomplice) confirms that the author has faltered when it most matters.
This is a pity because Hughes is an impressive talent and deserves all the praise he's been getting (including a major crime writing award in the US last year). Those final hurdles can be a killer, though.
- By john boland
