Shuggie Boyle is a hard man who knows what he wants. Having been released after serving four years in jail for armed robbery, all he needs to do is collect his share of the stash, which he’d carefully hidden, then get the hell out of California in Falkirk and make it to the better-known and rather warmer California, on the west coast of the USA. Shuggie dreams of Napa Valley and Sonoma, and of California beaches. Oh, and he also has to learn how to control his temper.
Tough but Funny Crime Tale
Shuggie’s short-fused temper has been his downfall many times, and he knows that if he’s to make it out of California - and out to California - then he has to learn to count to 10 and walk away from dangerous situations. Although this is a very tough tale, and Boyle a tough man, it’s also very funny. Some of the funniest scenes are flashbacks to Boyle’s time in prison, and his sessions with the therapist, Colin Knox, who reminds Shuggie of Jarvis Cocker and who he describes as "a long man in short trousers." Knox is the typical well-meaning but inept helper, who has his own dreams of helping people like Boyle sort out their problems, but who is totally out-of-touch with the world Shuggie comes from.
Shuggie Boyle’s Tale
There’s more humour too in Shuggie’s struggle to control that fiery temper, especially when provoked by cocky young kids who he could wipe the floor with - and is sorely tempted to. But he has a bigger aim, which is to retrieve that stash from his ex-girlfriend’s house, where he hid it somewhere it would never be found. Except, of course, it has been found, and Shuggie’s California dreamin’turns into more of a nightmare.
Shuggie also encounters the former pals he did the armed robbery with, Golly and Len, an unlikely duo who sometimes seem inept and harmless, but always with a feeling that they could explode and do something nasty at any moment. There’s always a tension when these two and Shuggie are together, and it says a lot for the skill of Banks’s writing that while Shuggie Boyle is a very nasty piece of work, the reader can also sympathize with him and his problems. It’s the mark of good writing - of any genre - that people and events are never black and white but are all shades of grey. The characters Ray Banks creates have a depth to them, with even the minor characters coming alive on the page.
Tartan Noir
There’s a fine tradition of tough Scottish crime writers, from the broader appeal of Ian Rankin to authors like Allan Guthrie, who are more in the hard-boiled school of writing, which really first began in California with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. Ray Banks fits right into this genre of writing, and the Library Journal called him "one of the freshest voices in hard-boiled crime fiction today."
California by Ray Banks
California is published at £4.99 in the UK by Five Leaves Publications as part of their Crime Express series of crime novellas, which also include Claws by Stephen Booth.
Mike Gerrard - Mike is an award-winning travel writer who has worked for National Geographic, the London Times, and many other clients. ...
