Tangled Web UK Review May 2008
Dog Eats Dog by
Iain Levison
pbk out May 08
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £8.99
British noir (if I can claim this novel for the home team) is on something of a roll at the moment: Charlie Williams, Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Mick Scully. Now, out of left-field, comes Aberdonian Iain Levison, currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina. First published in France (where they know a thing or two about noir) and now cannily snapped up by Bitter Lemon, this is his second novel and it’s a knockout.
Elias White is a junior college professor in a quiet New Hampshire town. Whilst scoping out the local talent in a German library when on a field trip, he has accidentally come across some "cool" discarded anti-semitic war-time German diaries, handily translated into English. And already he has mapped out a celebrity future in which the resulting treatise is picked up on far-right websites, and argued over on CNN and popular talk shows.
Elias is on the make in other ways too, notably with his more attractive female students, chief amongst which is the teenage Melissa, daughter of his next-door neighbour. Meanwhile an occasional whiff of gasoline though the open window of the room where he is frolicking with Melissa, is about to alert Elias to the existence of Dixon, on-the-run bank robber, injured, doused in gasoline (read the book!), and clutching a black laundry bag containing a quarter of a million from his last job.
A classic duel ensues as Dixon and Elias edge around each other, each pushing at the other’s boundaries, usually with surprising results. It’s more school of Elmore Leonard than the more downbeat style of those I’ve mentioned above. But you can’t help but be impressed by Levison’s lively pointed prose, his unerring feel for character, not to mention his confident pacing, whilst at the same time, incorporating, seemingly effortlessly, always relevant back-story.
Then Levison introduces a third key character: disillusioned FBI Agent Denise Lupo, smarter than the average male of the species, and hitting her head on that organisation’s glass ceiling, and on the track of money from the robbery. It’s another spot-on portrait that adds considerable delight to the reader’s involvment in the story. Meanwhile that back-story (as well as events in the present) gives Levison the chance, gleefully and often hilariously taken, to paint a pungent and often caustic picture of his adopted society. The ending might strike you as a little less noir than you’d like - until you think it through.
Delicious. Don’t miss.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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