Book review †cold blood Essay

Book review of Cold Blood by the author James Fleming The surname (he is Ian’s nephew) and terse title might lead one to expect something purely commercial and hard-boiled of James Fleming’s Cold Blood. But this sequel to White Blood, though in the thriller genre, is both more idiosyncratic and awkward than that. The tone is set on page one with the hero-narrator’s introductory self-description: â€Å"I, Charlie Doig†¦ six foot two, strong across the shoulders and through the loins. † Set during the Russian revolution and its bloody aftermath, this is as much tongue-in-cheek historical romp as page-turning cliffhanger. The novel’s opening finds Doig, an entomologist with a taste for derring-do, in western Burma, where he is glorying in his discovery of a new species of jewel beetle. We are briefly whisked back to his ancestral home in Russia – his ancestry is exotically cosmopolitan – for a whirlwind reprise of some of the principal elements of White Blood, notably the rape and torture (so hideous that Doig feels compelled to put her out of her misery with a bullet through the brain) of his beloved wife, Elizaveta, by the evil Bolshevik Prokhor Glebov. Cold Blood tells the story of Doig’s single-minded pursuit of Glebov across civil-warravaged Russia. First stop is St Petersburg, where, with his Mongolian sidekick, Kobi, he witnesses the Bolshevik seizure of power and discovers that Glebov has become one of the revolution’s leaders, up there with Lenin and Trotsky. With the struggle of Red v White spreading across the land, Doig is forced to step up a gear in his pursuit of vengeance, assembling a ragbag troop of henchmen and women and commandeering an armoured train. Thus equipped, Doig will take on not only Glebov, but the whole of the Red Army. If Doig is single-minded, his creator certainly isn’t, for he throws any number of other odds and sods into the narrative stew. There’s a cache of stolen tsarist gold that everyone wants to get their hands on. There’s a mysterious American who proves to be up to no good. There’s an erotic interest called Xenia who also proves to be up to no good. There are any number of colourful bit parts that flit into the narrative, command attention for a couple of pages and then flit out again. If writers can be divided into minimalists and maximalists, then Fleming is out there on the militant wing of the maximalists. Thrillers need variation of pace: moments when the grip is relaxed, the better to sock the reader with the unexpected. Fleming’s relentless energy and garrulous black humour – as Doig and his band of eccentric ne’er-do-wells career across the steppes to an explosive denouement – produce flashes of brilliance, but at the expense of tension. Cold Blood has an original and talented voice behind it, but in the end perhaps goes to show that the comedy thriller is one of the trickiest of literary hybrids to pull off. Cold Blood by the author James Fleming.