Review of UK Edition

Crime And Detective Stories 40 - December 2001
Bob Cornwell

A girl and a gun (or thereabouts - this adds two guys). All you need, said Jena-Luc Godard, to make a movie. But a book of 372 pages?

The guys are, of course, killers, but Eddie needs a reason. It might only be the intransigence of a 7-Eleven clerk over the one cent of the price of a pack of cigarettes that Eddie doesn't have, but he needs a reason. Ray Bob is pure psycho. Both are Texas low-life, white trash excluded by their background from an environment rich in possibilities. Their would-be nemesis is Rule Hooks, instinctive and relentless, a lone (Texas) Ranger with woman trouble and more in common with Ray Bob than he knows. The girl is Della Street, small town model manqu&eaqcute;, trawling for male company at a Houston Holiday Inn. But Mr Nice Guy turns out to be Mr Kink and as Della desperately defends her honour, she sticks a knife in him. As the duo becomes a trio, the dynamics of the group, already uneasy, inexorably begin to change, with Della as the catalyst. But to what end?

Right off you know Christopher Cook's first novel will be different. "They were sliding south down Lamar after rib sandwiches and beer at T-Bones Bar-B-Q House. Gong no place particular on a lazy day in May. Laid back under a babyblue sky, the sun floating in it like a warm dab of butter... Moving through bright southern light and summer heat, vehicle exhaust rising acrid off asphalt, the hypnotic afternoon post-potative haze." That "post-potative" would have Elmore Leonard reaching for the back-space key, but you get the idea. not for nothing has this book been endorsed by James Crumley.

Cook wonderfully sustains those 372 pages: sixty-odd short chapters, mostly written in urgent, drivign prose with rich terse dialogue, constantly changing viewpoints, the characters evolving in unepected ways. No less extraordinary are his descriptive passages: internal meditations of sometimes biblical intensity, externally Texas a palpable presence from Austin's "Silicon Gulch" and the industrial "yellow bronzehaze" of Houston, " the cancer capital of the world," to the salt marsh and oyster beds of the Bolivar Peninsula and to the rich East Texas bottomlands, sonorous and fragrant, their bye-ways gradually becoming "an allusion...mere innuendo through the woods."

Alternately raw then lyrical, insistnetly subverting cliché, this is an excellent novel by an authentic new voice.

Geoff Bradley

Robbers by Christopher Cook - Main Page