Book review †cold blood Essay

Book review of Cold Blood by the author jam Fleming The surname (he is Ians nephew) and terse title might lead champion to expect something purely commercial and hard-boiled of James Flemings Cold Blood. But this sequel to gabardine Blood, though in the thriller genre, is both more idiosyncratic and awkward than that. The tone is set on page one with the hero-narrators introductory self-description I, Charlie Doig six bag two, strong crossways the shoulders and by the loins. Set during the Russian revolution and its bloody aftermath, this is as much bantering historical romp as page-turning cliffhanger.The novels opening finds Doig, an entomologist with a taste for derring-do, in western Burma, where he is glorying in his discovery of a new species of jewel beetle. We are briefly whisked put up to his ancestral home in Russia his ancestry is exotically cosmopolitan for a whirlwind reprise of some of the principal elements of White Blood, notably the rape and torture (so hi deous that Doig feels compelled to put her out of her misery with a bullet through the brain) of his beloved wife, Elizaveta, by the evil Bolshevik Prokhor Glebov.Cold Blood tells the story of Doigs single-minded chase of Glebov across civil-warravaged Russia. First stop is St Petersburg, where, with his Mongolian sidekick, Kobi, he witnesses the Bolshevik seizure of power and discovers that Glebov has become one of the revolutions leaders, up there with Lenin and Trotsky. With the struggle of Red v White spreading across the land, Doig is forced to step up a gear in his pursuit of vengeance, assembling a patchwork troop of henchmen and women and commandeering an armoured train. Thus equipped, Doig will take on not only Glebov, notwithstanding the safe and sound of the Red Army.If Doig is single-minded, his creator certainly isnt, for he throws any number of other odds and sods into the narrative stew. in that locations a cache of stolen tsarist gold that everyone wants to get their hands on. Theres a mysterious American who proves to be up to no good. Theres an erotic interest called Xenia who too proves to be up to no good. There are any number of colourful bit split that flit into the narrative, command attention for a couple of pages and then flit out again. If writers can be divided into minimalists and maximalists, then Fleming is out there on the militant wing of the maximalists.Thrillers need variation of tone moments when the grip is relaxed, the better to sock the reader with the unexpected. Flemings relentless energy and garrulous black mood as Doig and his band of eccentric neer-do-wells career across the steppes to an explosive denouement produce flashes of brilliance, but at the expense of tension. Cold Blood has an original and talented voice behind it, but in the end perhaps goes to show that the comedy thriller is one of the trickiest of literary hybrids to pull off. Cold Blood by the author James Fleming.