Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

An enforcer who works for a pair of London crime lords takes a little time off to look into the death of his brother.


Everybody knows the film adaptation "Get Carter", where Michael Caine makes a superb job of playing the one-track anti-hero, his emotional range displayed by INCREASING THE VOLUME WHEN HE'S A BIT ANGRY. Nothing wrong with that. It was a great way of portraying the man with anger constantly seething an inch below the surface. If the film (for the most part, a faithful rendition of the book) is a nineteen-seventies take on the Jacobean Revenge tragedy, then the book is an attempt at literary noir - part Raymond Chandler, part Jim Thompson. Willis's descriptions of the almost-Scunthorpe townscape and population bear comparison with Chandler and Hammett, as does much of the dialogue, while the seediness, corruption, and inevitability of the tragedy bring to mind the best of Jim Thompson's novels (which reminds me - I must search out "The Getaway" for a 2010 read).

I first (and most recently) read this almost forty years ago. It is about its time, but is in no way a period piece, no more than "The Big Sleep". It won't be forty years before I read it again.