Review

Times Literary Supplement
April 13^th 2001
By Roz Kaveney

Bad tempers and readily available guns add up to sudden death; Christopher Cook's impressive first novel starts here. Although we come to be fond of Eddie, the least unsympathetic of the male principals in Robbers, there is no attempt to extenuate the nastiness of the murder that opens the book. Eddie, an ex-con, gets into an argument with a sales clerk about the couple of extra coins needed to buy his cigarettes and ends up shooting the man dead. Both are being unreasonable , but it is Eddie who pulls the gun.

One of Cook's many successes in this book is the way he describes the process whereby guilt changes and matures Eddie. His companion, Ray Bob, however, needs no excuse to start shooting; time and time again, as the pair drive around Texas, engaging in small-scale hold-ups, Ray Bob kills people, and Eddie worries about it. Ray Bob is a man who hates the world and himself; early traumas have rotted any capacity he has for empathy or compassion to a point where his only virtue is a notion of loyalty to his friend, a loyalty which has no interest in what his friend actually wants. Eddie was betrayed by one of his partners in an earlier crime, and Ray Bob is determined to punish that betrayal, whether Eddie wants it punished or not.

Along the road, they pick up Della, who is on the run after stabbing a violent bar pick-up, and the atmosphere between the three becomes tense. Cook writes in the tradition of noir novelists like Jim Thompson, learning from that tradition how to get the most suspense out of every stop for gas, every rushed meal of fast food. Behind them are the hunters - a psychotic gun nut whose wife Ray Bob killed along the way - and Rule Hooks, a Texas Ranger with a relaxed attitude to bringing criminals in alive; Cook has no illusions about the forces of righteousness.

Ray Bob is heading for home - in the East Texas of marshland and wet forests and river bottoms - away from where they commit their crimes in the West Texas of long dry roads and plains that blow away as dust. Robert Frost described home as where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Ray Bob is an exception to those rules - an abused child turned matricide, whose relatives are as keen as anyone to shoot him down. Cook's evocation of landscapes both literal and internal is exemplary; his tendency to link the tow simplistically is a minor fault.

Like the best novels of crime and violence, Robbers offers us no easy answers; after a while, we do not want Eddie and Della to be caught and punished, nor do we want them to get away scot-free. Cook makes us believe in their love for each other, and in Eddie's potential gift as a bluesman, a gift increasingly linked to his guilt and shame for his crimes. We also do not want Rule Hooks either to succeed or to fail. Christopher Cook creates and then confuses a degree of emotional identification with the characters in a way that makes Robbers into something rather more than just a thriller.

Robbers by Christopher Cook - Main Page