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Bruce Medway #3
Blood Is Dirt
Enter into a treacherous world in West Africa, where British expatriate Bruce Medway, a clandestine “troubleshooter” and debt collector, finds himself unexpectedly immersed in toxic waste scams and mafia crime when a job for his newest client turns out to involve more than the recovery of two million dollars. But Napier, the client, isn’t the worst of Bruce’s problems; that falls to Selina, Napier’s seductive daughter, who wants more than money—she is out for revenge. In his attempt to help Selina, Bruce delves into more danger than he bargained for.
Nothing is static in this intense plot-driven novel where truth is murky and motives are hidden.While Bruce is no stranger to lies, deceit, and crime, he has never met anyone like Selina and her cohorts. And even though Selina is alluring, not even love can change the fact that in this world, blood is dirt.
A Harvest Original
Nothing is static in this intense plot-driven novel where truth is murky and motives are hidden.While Bruce is no stranger to lies, deceit, and crime, he has never met anyone like Selina and her cohorts. And even though Selina is alluring, not even love can change the fact that in this world, blood is dirt.
A Harvest Original
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
23 people are currently reading
141 people want to read
About the author
Robert Wilson
456 books520 followersRobert Wilson has written thirteen novels including the Bruce Medway noir series set in West Africa and two Lisbon books with WW2 settings the first of which, A Small Death in Lisbon, won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999 and the International Deutsche Krimi prize in 2003. He has written four psychological crime novels set in Seville, with his Spanish detective, Javier Falcón. Two of these books (The Blind Man of Seville and The Silent and the Damned) were filmed and broadcast on Sky Atlantic as ‘Falcón’ in 2012. A film of the fourth Falcón book was released in Spain in 2014 under the title La Ignorancia de la Sangre. Capital Punishment, the first novel in his latest series of pure thrillers set in London and featuring kidnap consultant, Charles Boxer, was published in 2013 and was nominated for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. This was followed by You Will Never Find Me in 2014. The third book in the series, Stealing People, will be published in 2015. Robert Wilson loves to cook food from all over the world but especially Spanish, Portuguese, Indian and Thai. He also loves to walk with dogs…and people, too.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 24, 2016
This was a dark suspense tale set in West Africa featuring a troubleshooter/fixer who specializes in the retrieval of "extensively borrowed" money which sounds so much nicer than stolen. The plot was pretty complex and kind of veered off the rails a bit but the unique characters, sharp humor, and great descriptions of Africa made this an engaging read.
July 31, 2013
I have just finished reading the Father's Day gift I received from my son. I know, it's a long time since then, but I have plenty of excuses. Anyway, he and I share an appreciation for good writing, even if it comes in the form of a suspense novel; and I look forward to his recommendations and gifts. He has introduced me to a number of writers whose work I would otherwise have missed.
Such is the case with Robert Wilson. I tried one of his novels a while ago and couldn't get on with it--I forget its title. But Blood Is Dirt arrived on Father's Day, and I finally got to it last week. It's a good read--hardboiled stuff, with the inevitable echoes of everybody's master, Raymond Chandler. I found it a little slow at the start, but the pace picked up and I was pretty soon engaged in the action, which involves everything from toxic waste and shady, multi-million dollar oil deals to the illegal transportation and sale of nuclear material. The hero, Bruce Medway, does a lot of hard drinking, suffers not only from hangovers but the occasional beating from the bad guys, and tries to sort out his love life. Meantime, he pursues the truth with relentless tenacity, and ends up none the richer for having found it.
So the story is good, the array of despicable characters motley and believable. We meet the would-be despots, the plutocrats, the barflies and the working girls, the cops and the tradesfolk, and the vast numbers who struggle to keep afloat, from dock workers to cab drivers. But what makes the story come alive, as much as these, is the setting. Wilson grabs us by the heels and drags us into the squalid, seething world of contemporary West Africa--Benin, in particular, and Nigeria--despoiled by the advance of Western culture, the once-pristine air foully polluted by ubiquitously clogged traffic on the highways and the fumes of industry. Along with the hero, we sweat in the pitiless heat on the trek from seedy hotels, slums and warehouse districts to the depths of the jungle and the luxurious residences of those who profit from an economy that leaves the rest in abject poverty.
Wilson captures the greed and desperation of an overpopulated world, where mere survival is for most an endless struggle. The glimpses of human kindness, laughter and love are rare in this book--but nonetheless welcome rays of light that penetrate the fetid atmosphere and leave us, well, glad that it all turned out alright in the end. Justice, of a kind, was served. The hero survives for what we're sure will be another hard day tomorrow.
Such is the case with Robert Wilson. I tried one of his novels a while ago and couldn't get on with it--I forget its title. But Blood Is Dirt arrived on Father's Day, and I finally got to it last week. It's a good read--hardboiled stuff, with the inevitable echoes of everybody's master, Raymond Chandler. I found it a little slow at the start, but the pace picked up and I was pretty soon engaged in the action, which involves everything from toxic waste and shady, multi-million dollar oil deals to the illegal transportation and sale of nuclear material. The hero, Bruce Medway, does a lot of hard drinking, suffers not only from hangovers but the occasional beating from the bad guys, and tries to sort out his love life. Meantime, he pursues the truth with relentless tenacity, and ends up none the richer for having found it.
So the story is good, the array of despicable characters motley and believable. We meet the would-be despots, the plutocrats, the barflies and the working girls, the cops and the tradesfolk, and the vast numbers who struggle to keep afloat, from dock workers to cab drivers. But what makes the story come alive, as much as these, is the setting. Wilson grabs us by the heels and drags us into the squalid, seething world of contemporary West Africa--Benin, in particular, and Nigeria--despoiled by the advance of Western culture, the once-pristine air foully polluted by ubiquitously clogged traffic on the highways and the fumes of industry. Along with the hero, we sweat in the pitiless heat on the trek from seedy hotels, slums and warehouse districts to the depths of the jungle and the luxurious residences of those who profit from an economy that leaves the rest in abject poverty.
Wilson captures the greed and desperation of an overpopulated world, where mere survival is for most an endless struggle. The glimpses of human kindness, laughter and love are rare in this book--but nonetheless welcome rays of light that penetrate the fetid atmosphere and leave us, well, glad that it all turned out alright in the end. Justice, of a kind, was served. The hero survives for what we're sure will be another hard day tomorrow.
December 21, 2015
Looking for a different detective novel? Look no further. This gumshoe hangs his hat in Africa and he's likeable and flawed and always interesting. A smart and gripping tale about Africa, especially Nigeria, Benin, corporate fraud and political corruption. It's also funny and moves along at a good clip. Wilson is deft with characterization and complexity, and the writing is so evocative you'll feel by turns drunk, hot or terrified as you read.
A great example of what detective fiction should be: smart, original, funny and interesting.
A great example of what detective fiction should be: smart, original, funny and interesting.
June 10, 2013
A great African gumshoe featuring a boozy expat Brit, the book drips with African sun and sweat and booze and corruption. I liked the combination of detective and mystery in a locale that I did not know. By the end of the intriguing novel I felt like I'd seen the mystery solved and at the same time glimpsed a very strange and interesting bit of West Africa.
May 25, 2013
A very good book set in West Africa. Full of seedy characters with a good storyline.
May 24, 2022
The private eye genre is wonderfully translatable to an infinity of settings. As long as you have the basic elements (a jaded, not too prosperous hero with a selective but iron-clad sense of honor taking on corrupt wealth and power), the story can take place pretty much anywhere. Robert Wilson's Bruce Medway series takes place in West Africa, which provides ample corruption along with plenty of hot nights and free-flowing booze for atmosphere.
In this one, set in Benin and Nigeria, Medway is hired by a British commodities trader to help him recover money he says was stolen from him. A meeting is set up, things go wrong, the trader turns up dead, and Medway and his African partner Bagado try to sort out the mess, with the trader's oversexed daughter injecting herself into the fray.
It's a rich setting, with a motley crew of disreputable European expats intriguing with local strong men to get rich quick at the expense of the long-suffering populace, and no clear dividing line between crime and politics. It's not for the faint of heart; there's kinky sex and shocking violence, and you get the impression that West Africa is not a very nice place. But as a setting for a P.I. novel, it's first-rate.
In this one, set in Benin and Nigeria, Medway is hired by a British commodities trader to help him recover money he says was stolen from him. A meeting is set up, things go wrong, the trader turns up dead, and Medway and his African partner Bagado try to sort out the mess, with the trader's oversexed daughter injecting herself into the fray.
It's a rich setting, with a motley crew of disreputable European expats intriguing with local strong men to get rich quick at the expense of the long-suffering populace, and no clear dividing line between crime and politics. It's not for the faint of heart; there's kinky sex and shocking violence, and you get the impression that West Africa is not a very nice place. But as a setting for a P.I. novel, it's first-rate.
July 7, 2024
One of the best African noir books you will ever read and so much more interesting than the paint by numbers pulp set in LA.
Blood is Dirt shapes up as the perfect noir novel.
It surpasses the Big Killing with a tighter plot and a less confusing cast of characters The hyper Ray Chandler style that saturates the first Bruce Medway novel to the point of exhaustion (but in a good way) is dialled down but still simmers away and the Lagos setting is what makes it boil.
Blood is Dirt shapes up as the perfect noir novel.
It surpasses the Big Killing with a tighter plot and a less confusing cast of characters The hyper Ray Chandler style that saturates the first Bruce Medway novel to the point of exhaustion (but in a good way) is dialled down but still simmers away and the Lagos setting is what makes it boil.
April 13, 2024
Bruce Medway gets heavily involved with the wrong people, forced upon him by a casual friend, and finds himself involved with murder, toxic waste dumping and his girlfriend in Africa. Only by the skin of his teeth does he get out alive.
May 15, 2012
I came across a great bit of verse by Wilfred Owen which introduces the Noirish crime novel from 1997 Blood is Dirt by Robert Wilson.
‘Blood’s dirt,’ he laughed, looking away
Far off to where his wound had bled
And almost merged for ever into clay.
‘The world is washing out its stains,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t like our cheeks so red:
Young blood’s its great objection.
But when we’re duly white-washed, being dead,
The race will bear Field-Marshal God’s inspection.’
Wilson’s tale of toxic waste, politics and murder is a taut thriller set in Benin and Nigeria. Tightly written, edgy, with lots of sex and violence, some insight into Nigerian and Beninois society and hair raising tales of how white ex-pats operate on the ‘dark continent’. The narration’s tone is very British with shades of Greeneland.
The novel follows down-at-heel and brutalized private investigator Bruce Medway, a white man, as he tries to untangle dodgy-goings on amongst the business elites and their Caucasian enablers of both countries. The plot races faster than the clapped-out cars in which Medway speeds through African slums. Everyone but Medway’s German girlfriend is either dysfunctional, perverted or corrupt, and the author obviously knows his settings well. It’s a better than average ‘beach read’, leagues ahead of any conventional crime bestsellers. But while everything shines on the surface and keeps us turning the peages, the devil is in the detail. Sex and violence in Blood is Dirt work really well while they are implied. But the moment Wilson tackles either subject head on, the prose becomes stilted, as if the author had understood his characters but never actually lived them. Considering that Medway gets his testicles burnt by a blow torch, that’s perhaps a bit too much to ask. Despite tortures physical and emotional, the book lacks genuine emotional depth and the reviewers comparing Wilson to Raymond Chandler are overrating the prose.
Robert Wilson leaves us with the feeling that Africa is not a continent, but a war, one that will never end. It is really the appropriate quote by World War I Poet Wilfred Owen which gives this 1997 debut novel its title that grabbed me. Superb, and at the time hardly in tune with Britain’s patriotic war fervor. War poets are a thing of the past, but as the UK is finding new excuses to engage militarily in poverty stricken nations around the world – from Afghanistan to Lybia – perhaps a new generation of writers exposing the true human cost of armed conflict is sharpening pencils or filing down keyboards out there, somewhere.
If you enjoyed this review, check out my Noir and Pulp blog The Devil's Road my link text
‘Blood’s dirt,’ he laughed, looking away
Far off to where his wound had bled
And almost merged for ever into clay.
‘The world is washing out its stains,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t like our cheeks so red:
Young blood’s its great objection.
But when we’re duly white-washed, being dead,
The race will bear Field-Marshal God’s inspection.’
Wilson’s tale of toxic waste, politics and murder is a taut thriller set in Benin and Nigeria. Tightly written, edgy, with lots of sex and violence, some insight into Nigerian and Beninois society and hair raising tales of how white ex-pats operate on the ‘dark continent’. The narration’s tone is very British with shades of Greeneland.
The novel follows down-at-heel and brutalized private investigator Bruce Medway, a white man, as he tries to untangle dodgy-goings on amongst the business elites and their Caucasian enablers of both countries. The plot races faster than the clapped-out cars in which Medway speeds through African slums. Everyone but Medway’s German girlfriend is either dysfunctional, perverted or corrupt, and the author obviously knows his settings well. It’s a better than average ‘beach read’, leagues ahead of any conventional crime bestsellers. But while everything shines on the surface and keeps us turning the peages, the devil is in the detail. Sex and violence in Blood is Dirt work really well while they are implied. But the moment Wilson tackles either subject head on, the prose becomes stilted, as if the author had understood his characters but never actually lived them. Considering that Medway gets his testicles burnt by a blow torch, that’s perhaps a bit too much to ask. Despite tortures physical and emotional, the book lacks genuine emotional depth and the reviewers comparing Wilson to Raymond Chandler are overrating the prose.
Robert Wilson leaves us with the feeling that Africa is not a continent, but a war, one that will never end. It is really the appropriate quote by World War I Poet Wilfred Owen which gives this 1997 debut novel its title that grabbed me. Superb, and at the time hardly in tune with Britain’s patriotic war fervor. War poets are a thing of the past, but as the UK is finding new excuses to engage militarily in poverty stricken nations around the world – from Afghanistan to Lybia – perhaps a new generation of writers exposing the true human cost of armed conflict is sharpening pencils or filing down keyboards out there, somewhere.
If you enjoyed this review, check out my Noir and Pulp blog The Devil's Road my link text
December 5, 2014
Robert Wilson is one of my favourite authors. I loved A Darkening Stain and Instruments of Darkness. I got on less well with this book. It started brilliantly with a murder, but the middle was pages of politics and rice shipping, which bored me senseless and which I skimread. I felt the book would have been much improved by cutting or summarising most of this stuff, which was neither dramatic nor atmospheric. I clocked back into the novel about fifty pages from the end, at which point Bruce was trying to sell fake plutonium to an African chief for reasons I had missed. The toxic chemical plot was also dumped early, which was a shame because I'm sure he could have got some dramatic mileage out of it. Better than endless discussion of shipping, anyway.
April 1, 2012
This was very interesting. I should have read this book before I read "A Darkening Stain". Both were good but "A Darkening Stain" was noir. By a long shot. "Blood is Dirt" was good with some new characters for later books.
August 26, 2015
I have read all of Wilson's books and been a fan - but this one was just wearying. The story - of exploitation and double dealing - was too complex, too many nasty rotten protagonists with no one doing a good deed. Forget it!
June 25, 2009
Great, descriptive writer. I will definitely read more.
February 8, 2011
Incredibly dark mystery novels set in west Africa. Writing in taunt and vivid. Hard to imagine a more evil set of characters than those in Robert Wilson's Bruce Medway series.
April 29, 2014
Another excellent Bruce Medway thriller!
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews