Gareth Creer

Page Updated: 28/01/02

Gareth Creer

Big Sky

pbk 12 Jan 02

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Books By Gareth Creer

About the Author (Photo by Michele Turriani)

Bibliography

Paperback - Black Swan (2002)

Big Sky
See Review by Cath Staincliffe - Author of the highly acclaimed Sal Kilkenny Mysteries set on the Mean Streets of Manchester
Jimmy’s turf is a stretch of coastline in North-East England, where he and his ramshackle crew live comfortably on ill-gotten gains. But the time has come for them to leave these shores and seek anonymity in Spain: only before they can do this, Jimmy must pull off one last scam. A good man who has to do bad things, Jimmy sings his dirty song like an angel. And why wouldn’t he? He’s mute.
‘Although this scenario has been written about and filmed many times before . . . rarely has it received such skilful treatment as it does here. With its unlikely hero, Jimmy Mack, a mute whose simple quest is to save a soul, Big Sky lends the drugs-and-demons genre an absorbing dignity. Creer’s literary genres are eclectic and well-chosen. Like Ian Rankin, he readily combines bleakness with extraordinary compassion; like Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, he operates in a world where justice is not always the province of the law; and, like James Ellroy, he can endow the most extreme acts of retribution with poetic resonance. Yet the voice is absolutely his own . . . Creer’s England is deeply engraved . . . [his] strong sense of place can transform a fictional nowhere into a place that is both exact and real. His writing is distinguished by his affection for the characters who inhabit these landscapes. Big S3- may be fashionably characterised under urban nightmare, but it is less a novel about bad men in a bad world than it is about ordinary people coping with a life that is better than the one they think they deserve’ Nicola Upson, New Statesman
`Amid the devilish plot twists Creer makes room to flesh out his principals most satisfyingly, and establish a page blurring pace which he underpins with a unique and oddly lush economy of language’ Chris Power, The Times
‘Creer’s sensitive and poised writing lifts the novel into a class of its own, closer to vintage Martin Amis than Rancid Aluminium . . . exquisitely raw in tone, with a sparse and timeless beauty’ Manchester Evening News
‘Ambitious and, in terms of British crime writing, original. It escapes the leaden plotting and ingratiating rhetoric of much hard-case literature’ The Times Literary Supplement
‘A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity’ Independent
‘Rumbustiously entertaining. . . partly because Jimmy is an engaging and strangely innocent hero, and partly because of Creer’s heady; Burgess-meets-Berkoff prose’ Daily Mail
'Provides some of the best descriptions of drug-driven hedonism presently in circulation. But the novells real strength lies not in its concession to the underworld conventions of the urban narrative, but in what it brings to the domestic one.' Ra Page, The Times (Cradle to Grave)

About The Author
Gareth Creer was born in Salford in 1961, and brought up in North Manchester. He went to Oxford and then into the City. In 1994 he abandoned his career to write full time, taking the Sheffield Hallam MA writing course. He is the author of Skin and Bone, for which film rights have been sold, and Cradle to Grave. He lives in the North with his wife and daughters and is the writer-in-residence at Glen Parva Prison for Young Offenders.

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Big Sky (Doubleday, 2001) Black Swan Pbk Jan 02

Skin and Bone

Cradle to Grave Pbk Mar 00