Fury was one of the most sheerly enjoyable American crime novels I read last year
(joined, if you want to know, by Robert Ferrigno's Scavenger Hunt and Ed McBain's
Fat Ollie's Book). Here Ford, hitherto unpublished over here but perhaps best known
for his Leo Waterman series, introduces Frank Corso, reclusive columnist and
occasional reporter for the Seattle Sun. Corso's a dead ringer for an older Steve Segal,
yes, with the ponytail but don't hold that against him. Once fired from the New York
Times for fabricating a story, he is hired by the Sun's owner, Natalie van der
Hoven, who has spotted Corso's "messianic tendency" and is convinced that despite
everything he is "an unusually honourable man". So when Leanne Samples claims,
six days before the death penalty is to be carried out, that her vital identification of
Walter Leroy Himes as the Trashman serial killer was mistaken, who best to write the
story than the reporter who treated her "nice" when she first made waves. And when
the city administration reacts to that story in quite a different way to the one Corso
expects, clearly something more than an unfortunate miscarriage of justice is at stake...
So what makes this book so great?
Well, apart from a hugely satisfying plot of
inexorable pace that out-Cobens Harlan Coben at every twist and turn, there is Ford's
satirical world-view and an uncanny ability to create a credible picture of institutions
at a time of stress, for instance a big-city newspaper grappling with problems of ethics
in a cut-throat commercial world, or a City Hall seen through the eyes of its public
relations officer, the whole larded with quick-fire pungent dialogue ("I'm so horny the
crack of dawn better be careful...").
But most of all, it is its cast of characters that fascinates. Ford creates characters
that continually flout cliché: Leanne is clearly one of life's put-upon people, but is
given her own dignity; Himes not only bears the name of crime fiction's most famous
black writer, he is every liberal's wet dream, a simple black innocent convicted on
circumstantial evidence until he opens his mouth, leaving his audience intense with
hatred; Corso's tattooed assistant and photographer, Meg Dougherty, six feet of "pure
Seattle Gothic", who vitally contributes her knowledge of Seattle street life (and much
else) to the case. Even relatively minor characters glow with life. Note particularly the
beautifully sketched relationship between young black graffiti artist Bobby Ford and
his mum.
A joy, from its opening courtroom shoot-out to its artfully extended climax,
American crime writing at its most flamboyantly fluorescent. Do check it out.
Fury by
G M Ford
