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Glass Shot
Stew Boyle is a Welsh yob, a 36-year-old divorced slob garage mechanic vegetating in the valleys. He's also Cardiff's version of Martin Amis's Keith Talent, the sort of man Thatcher's Britain forgot ... He lives off beer, peanuts, and fantasies that are fuelled by American movies, a cowboy outfit and trinkets stolen from any (and one in particular) leggy blonde customer of Quick-Change tyre fitters. Duncan Bush has a prose style pumped up to bursting-point which mangages to hold top gear through a rumbustiously enjoyable modern thriller
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First published March 25, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 11, 2015
Crime Noir at its best. Beautifully written, suspenseful, and a brilliant exploration of 80's Britain, Consumerism, Globalization and Centre-periphery conflicts. Seen through the perspective of an unreliable narrator of colossal proportions. This book is a forgotten crime noir classic, and I encourage you to read it. Duncan Bush, better know for his poetry, is an excellent writer. Highly recommended.
August 23, 2014
A crime thriller in first person from the killer's point of view. It should not work, yet it does. Though I never found myself actually liking the main character, it was written in such a way that had me invested in him in a way, so I did actually care about what happened and kept reading.
March 29, 2018
When a prize-winning Welsh poet unexpectedly writes a crime novel, the result should be something well beyond the ordinary – a feast of language at the very least.
Ah well. The first-person narrator is a divorced tyre-fitter from Cardiff who has a hang-up about women in general and his ex-wife in particular coupled with some ill-formed fantasies about America (he hangs around in a cowboy shirt and a 1957 Thunderbird). Maybe Duncan Bush thought that writing about Cardiff low-lifes was so easy you just didn’t have to bother – have the narrator say fucking this and fucking that, have him leer at women from time to time, and that should do it. Don’t bother listening to how people talk. Don’t bother that we are supposed to be in South Wales. Don’t bother that your tyre-fitter keeps forgetting who he's supposed to be and starts telling us about the “coup de foudre” of seeing a girl he fancies, or how much he admires a cinematic shot of the mansard roofs of Paris, or starting a sentence “It’s like that guy Wittgenstein said...” (which I where I finally gave up).
How could a novel written by a poet be so cloth-eared and leaden-footed? How could a book written by a Welsh poet have so little sense of place and language and people?
Ah well. The first-person narrator is a divorced tyre-fitter from Cardiff who has a hang-up about women in general and his ex-wife in particular coupled with some ill-formed fantasies about America (he hangs around in a cowboy shirt and a 1957 Thunderbird). Maybe Duncan Bush thought that writing about Cardiff low-lifes was so easy you just didn’t have to bother – have the narrator say fucking this and fucking that, have him leer at women from time to time, and that should do it. Don’t bother listening to how people talk. Don’t bother that we are supposed to be in South Wales. Don’t bother that your tyre-fitter keeps forgetting who he's supposed to be and starts telling us about the “coup de foudre” of seeing a girl he fancies, or how much he admires a cinematic shot of the mansard roofs of Paris, or starting a sentence “It’s like that guy Wittgenstein said...” (which I where I finally gave up).
How could a novel written by a poet be so cloth-eared and leaden-footed? How could a book written by a Welsh poet have so little sense of place and language and people?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews