By Barry Forshaw
18 March 2002
What makes us pick up new
books by the same crime novelists time and
time again? The jaundiced aficionado demands only that a
favourite author
recycles their sure-fire tropes in a surprising
fashion and couldn't give a
damn about redefinitions of the thriller form. On that basis,
both Carl
Hiaasen and John Connolly can be relied upon to push all of our buttons
without challenging conventions too radically.
Connolly delivers such
grisly and adroitly plotted novels as The White Road
without working up a sweat. A sardonic Irishman who has
become one of
the most distinguished practitioners of US crime-writing, he
has an unerring
ear for the American idiom, so that all his books (notably
this latest) convey
vividly evoked locations.
In the South Carolina of The
White Road, a black man has beencondemned
to death for the rape and murder of the daughter of one of the
richest men in
the state. Needless to say, nobody wants to come near a case
like this, but
laconic dick Charlie Parker – the "Bird"
encountered in previous offerings
from Connolly – is an old hand at unwinnable
cases. For him, though, an
involvement in the case becomes very personal. A fundamentalist
preacher
in a prison cell takes a bizarre revenge on Parker using a
strange creature
that keeps its secrets buried near a riverbank.
The book synthesises
literate, poetic writing with
scarifying grue: a
marriage that produces far more persuasive results
than the by-numbers
blood-letting of so much crime writing. As the
phantasmagorical narrative
barrels towards a bizarre conclusion
in the Southern
swamps,
Parker must
travel the eponymous White Road to a nightmare reckoning.
Connolly's speciality
has always been strip-mining the evil that resides in
the darkest psychic corners, and this is his most extreme
venture into that
territory. There are few writers who are prepared to
take such a plunge
into the kind of psychopathology that underpins The White Road, and
the
squeamish would be better off with
something cosier.
Agatha Christie this ain't. |