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Book Review: A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory

Written by: one-eyed Jack

The Sacred Monster and its heart of darkness

If this is your first foray into the writings of R J Ellory, you will miss the subtle joke that he’s playing on the reader. For several of the early pages I couldn’t stop smiling, and I can imagine him smiling broadly himself as he composed his words. Not that there’s anything remotely funny about the subject matter, which starts off with the brutal murder of a woman in her Washington DC home and which soon develops into a serial killer investigation. What gave the secret away were the words in the dust jacket: “Detective Robert Miller is assigned to the case”. So blatantly corny, so stereotypical of countless crime fiction thrillers, that I knew that among other things, the author had made the decision to write in a particular style that would be as different as possible from the five novels that preceded it, which incidentally are all very different from one another too. There’s nothing corny or stereotypical about the narrative or dialogue itself, I hasten to add; Ellory is an exceptionally talented story-teller with this unusual capacity to select a particular style and stick with it so as to give that specific novel an identity of its own such that it stands apart from the story itself. He has succeeded, yet again.

Having said that, there is a small but significant reminder in its concept that reminds me of his third novel A QUIET VENDETTA, that being the development of a relationship between the leading character and his nemesis. This time around, it isn’t a case of the hunted telling his life story to his hunter, rather it emerges that the hunter finds himself being manipulated if not directed by his key suspect such that every step of his investigation seems to have been orchestrated and controlled. It is in every sense a suspense thriller, a tale in which the detective pursues endless leads and forensic trails only to find that every single one leads to nothing. Dead people have names, addresses, jobs and bank accounts but little evidence that they ever existed. Potential witnesses vanish without trace. Life histories appear to be utterly fabricated. It’s a painful pleasure to share the maddening emotions that Detective Miller has to endure throughout this case, which unusually for Ellory is spread over a very short period, just over a week in fact.

Inevitably however there is some looking back into the past, and not for the first time in this writer’s portfolio, some attempts are made to expose the hypocrisies of America’s political landmarks. I was reminded of vaguely similar efforts by the legendary James Ellroy and his epics AMERICAN TABLOID and its sequel THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, which attempted to seduce readers into thinking that the facts behind such events as presidential assassinations and American involvement in various conflicts - some of its own making - were not in any way accurately reported in the media. So we have another feast for conspiracy lovers, but it was a touch disappointing to see that despite the time-stamp of 2006 there was almost no mention at all of the invasion of Iraq three years earlier. In fairness that conspiracy would appear to be motivated by a different kind of agenda to this one, so perhaps we can look forward to another day when Ellory will tailor a story to something more contemporary than this one, which took place in the Reagan administered years of the 1980s.

Where this novel excels is in its relentless capacity to build up tension and suspense. With 100 pages to go, I could not imagine an ending that could contain the explosive revelations, even though the reader has a rather better idea of what’s going on than the unfortunate Detective Miller. Instead of vivid imagery and in-depth characterisation, just two skills that Ellory has demonstrated more than ably in the past, here he focuses on mystery, confusion and conspiracy. Some might argue that it is too far-fetched, that the historical events mentioned were not the work of some covert world-controlling agency, but then few if any of us have the evidence to prove otherwise. In any case, I don’t buy novels such as this to shoot them down or try to out-guess the objectives or the reasons behind what’s going on; I buy them to be entertained, to take myself away from the pretty grim and unattractive ‘real world’ that many of us are living in at the moment, and in this respect A Simple Act of Violence does exactly what I wanted it do, to provide some sense of escapism that isn’t fantasy; it’s about people and events that might just be as frighteningly real as they are portrayed here. So it’s a maximum 5 stars once again, Ellory remaining the only author whose works I have read to get top marks from me for each and every novel published. Each of his novels is difficult to compare with any of his others because they are all so different, and as a writer I think he stands tall among all of his peers.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 7:29 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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