Phil > Recent Status Updates

Having spent my entire writing life being told that one should cut, edit, and condense a narrative as much as possible, do away with all unnecessary narrative and explanation, and keep The Story as pristine as possible, it is really f***ing annoying to find a successful crime author rambling between plot, history, characterisation, and narrative conceit. So far, irritating.

Peace's tetralogy of psychogeographic crime novels is so perfectly pitched, that I - a citizen of the geographic area in which it is set - am reading it for the third time in 10 years, extracting even more in suspense, cleverness, and terrified recognition than last time I visited it - or, rather, took a stroll out of my front door into its setting. The whole cycle is going to get 5 stars when I finish this reread.

I may be the only person in the country that did, but I loved the BBC's recent dark, downbeat, grimy and utterly unheroic adaptation of this book. So much so that, it all having been screened and a suitably open and pessimistic ending achieved, I have withdrawal symptoms. So I thought I'd better read Deighton's original...