Tag: Michael Marshall Smith

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book reading reviews

We Are Here – Michael Marshall

I chose this book because well it was just coming out and I thought it would be nice to review something current for a change. Also it appeared to be a stand-alone and not part of a series like the Straw Men trilogy so it wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t read all his back catalog yet. That turned out to be not quite true (see below).

This is a hard book to review because it’d be so easy to spoil it and I don’t want to do that. I also don’t want to hide most of my review behind spoiler tags so…

We Are Here mostly centres around two couples. David and Dawn are a writer and his teacher wife who go into New York for the lunch that seals his first book deal. It’s a big day for them but on the way home David accidentally bumps into someone in the street. Someone who then follows him to the station and asks him to “Remember me”.

The other couple are John and Kristina. A waiter and bar-maid at an Italian restaurant who’ve been together about 6 months and are at the stage where they are about to either get more committed or possibly split up. Kristina’s new friend from her book club has seemingly acquired a stalker and asks John and Kris for help.

Both these stories concern encounters with people who live in a kind of parallel world. They are there in the background of our lives but often go unseen or unnoticed. But something is changing. They are coming out of the shadows…

I could talk more – vaguely and circuitously so as not to spoil – about the plot but I won’t. Let me talk instead about tone and themes. This is a book about regret, about loss of friendship and the way we forget people. It’s also about what it means to really live in a place and be part of someone’s life. In that sense it deals with some universal and weighty themes and does so well I think.

However it’s not a ponderous literary novel. It’s a thriller. It reminded me of Stephen King in places, which is a compliment. I enjoyed several of the characters. The author writes a middle-aged lady with nine cats who lives in a trailer – and he manages to make me really like her 🙂

It’s not perfect. I think it could have been shorter. Particularly in the middle section where dramatic irony is stretched to the breaking point. Also, I was going to complain that there was an un-fired Chekov’s Gun in the form of very significant events from one character’s past which are mentioned more or less in passing but never really dealt with. However it turns out that this character, and these events, are from a previous book. Also they are mentioned because they affect who this person sees and interprets events in this story, so the gun is fired – it just has a quieter bang than you might think.

Anyway it all comes together in the final part of the book and we get a dramatic action-y ending. It left me feeling I’d enjoyed the ride.

8/10 – a thriller with more than a touch of the mysterious about it.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Straw Men – Michael Marshall (pages 9520-10015)

(May as well get this out there now too)

After enjoying Killer Move so much I started reading The Straw Men as the next but one book. M. had raved about it to me years ago but I’d always avoided it due to potential gore, violence etc but having read Killer Move I figured I could handle it. Unfortunately it was the book I was reading when I went home to see my dad after his heart attack (he’s still fine btw) and somehow that created bad associations for me so I abandoned it and didn’t start again until a couple of weeks ago.

The Straw Men follows three story lines initially. There’s the latest victim of a serial killer known as The Upright Man, a teenage girl he has abducted and, if true to form, will kill within a few days unless someone can stop him. There’s the story of Ward Hopkins ex-CIA and ex-various other similar careers who returns home to deal with his parents death in a car accident only to find that things are not quite as they had appeared. Finally there’s the shadowy, possibly mythical organisation known as ‘The Straw Men’. Who exactly they are, what their aims are and how they plan to fulfil them ends up connecting the other two story lines.

This is another excellent thriller from Michael Marshall. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Killer Move but it’s still very good. In particular the plot is very clever, the way things join up, the way Hopkins for instance figures out something about his parents by the state they’d left their home in (which to all the world looks normal) was smart and satisfying if you like that kind of thing. Also the plot rattles along as you’d expect but still with enough space for characterisation and relationship. There are some tough moments violence wise, a little worse than Killer Move in my opinion (though still not up to David Peace gruesome). One of the worst was a description of what unedited news footage of a terrorist attack would look like. I think that affected me because I know that such footage exists.

I feel like I have to justify why I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as Killer Move. It’s M.’s favourite Michael Marshall book (her favourite ever book is his Only Forward written as Michael Marshall Smith). Anyway I think the reasons I preferred the later book are as follows:

  • I was slightly spoiled – partly by some indirect remarks of M.’s which I correctly deduced plot points from, but mostly by reading the blurb on the back of the next book in this series. If you plan to read this book stay away from The Lonely Dead (or The Upright Man in the US) as it mentions the big reveal on the back cover.
  • I preferred the hero of Killer Move. Hopkins was fine. He was sympathetic, clever and very competent. But he was also a little bit of a stereotype, the ex-military/cop/security services guy investigating some dangerous mystery. Bill Moore, as I said at the time was an ordinary annoying man thrown into a gradually more complicated and dangerous situation. Also Bill had a wife he loved and Ward was alone (in that sense, he had a friend/colleague).
  • One of the characters disses Buffy in the first few pages – ok mostly kidding about this. (mostly!)

Having said all that if I’d read it first and not known anything about it maybe I’d have preferred it. Either way it’s still a great read.

8/10 – another great crime thriller from MM(S).

One oddity worth mentioning. I read the ebook of this (as I do with most new purchases now) and the story ends, there’s a section of ‘Acknowledgements’ (thanks to …) and then a section which in the table of contents is called “ebook extra”. Thinking this was like a dvd extra, deleted scene if you will, I thought I could see why it wasn’t in the original. This was a kind of coda explaining more clearly what had happened and how various characters ended up – most of which you could infer from what had gone before.

Except that it was in the original. It came immediately after what I had thought of as the final chapter. The acknowledgements came after that. weird.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Killer Move – Michael Marshall (pages 4827-5182)

Killer Move

A couple of books ago I said it was easy to review a book that I’d hugely enjoyed. Here’s one I enjoyed just as much but it’s harder to review  because, I think I don’t want to give too much away.

Killer Move is a novel by Michael Marshall, a name he goes by when writing crime fiction. When writing his earlier SciFi novels, such as Only Forward, he went by Michael Marshall Smith. And, when he wrote The Servants, which you’ll remember I also loved, he was M.M. Smith.

Anyway this is the first of his crime books I’ve read. I’ve avoided them partly because I knew that there was some fairly grim subject matter in the likes of The Straw Men. I carry around in my head that I don’t like such things but let’s be honest I’ve read and enjoyed Let the Right One In and 1974, and at least read 1977, all of which have material that’s as dark as any you’d find.

Still, the reason I picked up this book rather than the earlier crime ones was the intriguing blurb about it, and the fact that it didn’t on the face of it seem to be dominated by gruesome murders. And in fact that’s true. Mostly.

Killer Move is about Bill Moore, a florida realtor who’s ambitious and trying to push his career to the next level. He’s actually got a very nice life – a lovely home, a successful wife who he loves and enough money for a comfortable lifestyle – but he wants more. One day he receives a business card with the single word “Modified” written on it. From then on weird stuff starts to happen to him and slowly his life starts to unravel.

The thing I really like about this book is the way it slowly builds. Things happen at a pace that mean that initially it’s just intriguing, then gradually it becomes stranger, more involved, more dangerous until you’re in a full-on thriller. By the time the gruesome stuff shows up – and it does – it feels like you’re too wrapped up in the story to really worry about it. Plus it has become integral to the story anyway.

But it’s more than just the finely tuned mechanism of the plotting, it’s the slow reveal and/or evolution of Bill’s character. This is an ‘extraordinary things happen to an ordinary person’ type of story and what’s interesting is that the person he is at the beginning – obsessed with success, listens to self-help podcasts, reads positivity blogs and attends branding seminars – isn’t particularly likeable, but he slowly reveals himself to be more interesting than he first appears. I loved the main character of Stark in Only Forward, but I loved him from the first page with his dry wit and cool persona, Bill I grew to like as he both showed more of himself and was changed by the experience.

That’s what sets Killer Move apart from say a John Grisham thriller, though they share a clockwork precision of plot, the characterization. There are characters you sympathise with, ones you instantly like (like Stark), or dislike, or are appalled and intrigued by.

And there is some tough stuff in there but more of it is implied than seen. Certainly it doesn’t have that unrelenting grimness and all-humanity-is-scum feel of 1977.

It would also make a terrific movie.

My only quibble is the title – Killer Move is so generic as to be meaningless and it really doesn’t connect with anything specific in the book. There is an obvious one-word title but I suspect that it was rejected because it doesn’t say enough about what kind of book this is.

9/10 – an excellent gripping read and one that slowly builds up both tension and character development.

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25 books reading

25 Books, book 7, Binary – The Vaccinator/Andy Warhol’s Dracula

This book is actually a slim volume containing two longish short stories – one from Michael Marshall Smith and one from Kim Newman. I bought it for the Smith one but have just finished both and so I’m including it in my 25 books list.

The Vaccinator

It’s hard to know what to say about this story. It’s about a guy living in the Florida Keys who hires himself out as a kind of hostage negotiator for a very particular kind of ‘kidnappings’ as he refers to them (you’ll probably know them by another phrase).

The main character is engaging – he’s one of those ultra-competent macho men that are up to any challenge. He’s not as entertaining as Stark – my favourite Smith character from Only Forward, but that would be a tall order. It’s fun and quirky and doesn’t take itself too seriously, though it’s not an outright comedy either. Worth checking out if you’re a fan or a Smith completist.

6/10

Andy Warhol’s Dracula

This is a vampire story set in the late 70s. It mixes a straight-forward narrative with excerpts from an academic paper on the life and work of Andy Warhol – who was a vampire. Or at least in this alternate world he was.

Considering that I’m such a huge fan of Buffy you might find it odd that I generally avoid vampire fiction whether in movie, TV or book form. There’s just so much of it and so much of it isn’t that original. Given that, and given that I didn’t really care for the interruptions to the story that the academic paper provides, I was a little surprised to find myself won over by this. Even more so because the writing generally was so ‘busy’ – the exact opposite of the kind of spare, simple prose I think I like. Florid descriptions and colourful word-pictures abounded.

In the end though it had an engaging main character and an intriguing concept. Johnny Pop is a vampire who at the outset kills a punk girl Nancy and frames her drug-addled boyfriend Sid for it. The story goes on to chart his rise in the 70s nightlife of New York as he creates the drug ‘drac’ which is a form of powdered vampire blood that allows you to feel the rush of being a nosferatu for a night.

This is an alternate reality where not only do vampires exist and are widely known about, almost accepted, but also is peopled with a wide variety of characters from fiction and celebrities from our world. I guess it makes sense – Warhol is someone who made art using figures from popular culture, someone who arguably ‘fed’ off the celebrity of others,  and so it’s fitting that in this world where he’s a literal vampire we bump into Travis Bickle and Tony Manero , as well as Blondie, Sid and Nancy and a whole host of others.

Spotting the references was fun – I had to look up a couple and I’m sure there’s ones I missed – but in the end it was the story that pulled me through. I did want to know what happened next.

8/10

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, Book 1: The Servants by M.M. Smith

The Servants by M.M. Smith
The Servants by M.M. Smith

This is the first of my “25 Books” proper which I started to read on the 7th Jan 2009. I finished it on the 10th which was actually quite a long time since it’s fairly short. But that shouldn’t mislead you, I enjoyed it a lot, it’s just I was away that weekend.

Firstly I should say that “M.M. Smith” is yet another pseudonym for Michael Marshall Smith who writes fantasy/sci-fi under that name and crime fiction as Michael Marshall. I haven’t read any of the later because it’s pretty violent and I’m a little squeamish, but M. tells me it’s very good. I did enjoy his first book Only Forward which has a very particular (and funny) voice and is very inventive.

It was interesting to read this immediately after Slam because it’s also a book in which the main character is a boy, in this case he’s 11. Again it raises the question of whether it’s aimed at readers of that age. Again I think it’s written in a way they could follow but it’s also perfectly accessible to older readers too.

The Servants follows the story of Mark, his mum and stepdad, David. They’ve moved from London to Brighton. They’re living in a big house owned by David. In the basement there’s a tiny flat in which an old lady lives. Mark befriends her and she shows him something very interesting and special.

I really liked this book. I liked it because the writing, the setting and the story are very simple. I tend to like things that are simple, classic and unfussy and this has that feel. There are really only 4 characters, most of the action takes place inside the house and it’s all very simply written.

I also liked it because it does something that I admire. It lets us see through the eyes of a character things that that character himself does not see. To me that’s clever writing. It means that we see David as a bit more sympathetic than Mark does, which makes Mark in danger of seeming a little brattish. However he mellows and without giving anything away, he eventually sees it too.

I read something somewhere about it being a kind of ghost story but I don’t think it’s quite that. However it does have the atmosphere of a ghost story and there is a fantastical element to it.

The key to living anywhere is to know how to live there – just ask any snail.

9/10 – simply written but moving story.