The Jook by
Gary Phillips
hbk out July 02
Published by Do Not Press
at £15
As soon as you pick up this book, advertised as a 'tough and gritty parable about life and death on the mean streets', you just know what you're going to get. The central character, through whose eyes you see the unfolding story, is Zelmont Raines, injury-prone American football player on the slide. He can't come to terms with his fate, and still tries to live the high-life of girls, booze and drugs. The trouble is this man, who gives the reader their whole perspective on the story, is a deeply unlikeable man. He treats women like trash, lies about his drug-taking habits, and has clearly no intention of changing on either count. He just wants to continue living the life, football has given him, and will do anything to achieve that. My most difficult moment came early on in the book, when he was told that his latest woman had been murdered. We get no indication that he gives a damn, and remember, we are inside his head. 'I didn't do it, man,' is all he whines. It's only in the last page that I feel there's a single shred of nobility or decency in Zelmont.
So, suspend your sense of political correctness, dig out your dictionary of American slang, along with your guide to American football terminology, and go with the flow of this fast-moving novel. When Zelmont Raines encounters Wilma Wells, leggy and brainy lawyer for the Barons football team, be prepared to marvel that there can be someone more amoral than Zelmont himself. She draws our anti-hero into a dangerous caper stealing from her mob-connected bosses, and the reader is left breathless as they carry through a heist that goes disastrously wrong.
The writing is pacy, and compelling, sucking you into Zelmont's subculture whether you like it or not. It doesn't even matter that its full of slang that doesn't mean a thing to the average reader. It's the rhythm and feeling that matters. And then there's that ending - I liked the ending.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
