Favourite Authors - an occasional series
September 6th 2006 14:31
I said in an earlier post you need to read everything you can find. This occasional series will point out authors you may not have come across. The main thing about the ones I will mention is they really know how to tell a story. And what the hell? You need to put your feet up and let the brain do the work for a while!
Robert Goddard is the writer I describe as ‘Agatha Christie for grown ups’. The plots twist like knotted string, and the characters are often multi layered and deeper than they first appear.
He has just written ‘Never Go Back’, his eighteenth novel in twenty years, which features his ‘hero’ Harry Barnett in his third story. His first, ‘Into The Blue’ showed Harry to be a hopeless drifter, caretaking a house on Rhodes for a friend. When a houseguest disappears, he is under suspicion for her murder, but he finds clues that set him on a course back into his past and deep into the lives and secrets of people he thought he knew, and by the story’s end we come to know there’s a lot more to Harry than first appears. The second, ‘Out Of The Sun’, is Harry chasing phantoms, the people responsible for harming a son he didn’t know he had, from an old liaison many years earlier, with the body count mounting around him. ‘Never Go Back’ tells of a reunion with some Army pals where they begin to drop off. Are they being hit by fatal old age, or something more sinister? It sounds like Harry lives in a world of death and mayhem, but I should add there are about twenty years between the first and third stories.
Back around 1993 or 1994, the first novel of his I read was ‘In Pale Battalions’. I’d never read anything like it, and the sheer propulsion of the constantly twisting plotline kept me awake ‘til all hours trying to figure out what was coming next, and then being amazed when it was something else entirely.
Most of the stories have at their heart a character, usually a man, adrift in his life in one way or another, suddenly drafted into events that he barely understands that he feels he must pursue to the very end, to seek out the truth whatever the cost. I suppose in some ways these books are a literary equivalent of the Hitchcock film ‘North by Northwest’, and crack along at about the same pace.
To be honest, there are a couple I like less than others – the ending of ‘Take No Farewell’ left me cold and annoyed, and ‘Set In Stone’ was a little odd, compared to his others – but he would have to be one of the top thriller writers working today.
Good starting points: ‘In Pale Battalions’, ‘Into The Blue’, and ‘Borrowed Time’.
Robert Goddard is the writer I describe as ‘Agatha Christie for grown ups’. The plots twist like knotted string, and the characters are often multi layered and deeper than they first appear.
He has just written ‘Never Go Back’, his eighteenth novel in twenty years, which features his ‘hero’ Harry Barnett in his third story. His first, ‘Into The Blue’ showed Harry to be a hopeless drifter, caretaking a house on Rhodes for a friend. When a houseguest disappears, he is under suspicion for her murder, but he finds clues that set him on a course back into his past and deep into the lives and secrets of people he thought he knew, and by the story’s end we come to know there’s a lot more to Harry than first appears. The second, ‘Out Of The Sun’, is Harry chasing phantoms, the people responsible for harming a son he didn’t know he had, from an old liaison many years earlier, with the body count mounting around him. ‘Never Go Back’ tells of a reunion with some Army pals where they begin to drop off. Are they being hit by fatal old age, or something more sinister? It sounds like Harry lives in a world of death and mayhem, but I should add there are about twenty years between the first and third stories.
Back around 1993 or 1994, the first novel of his I read was ‘In Pale Battalions’. I’d never read anything like it, and the sheer propulsion of the constantly twisting plotline kept me awake ‘til all hours trying to figure out what was coming next, and then being amazed when it was something else entirely.
Most of the stories have at their heart a character, usually a man, adrift in his life in one way or another, suddenly drafted into events that he barely understands that he feels he must pursue to the very end, to seek out the truth whatever the cost. I suppose in some ways these books are a literary equivalent of the Hitchcock film ‘North by Northwest’, and crack along at about the same pace.
To be honest, there are a couple I like less than others – the ending of ‘Take No Farewell’ left me cold and annoyed, and ‘Set In Stone’ was a little odd, compared to his others – but he would have to be one of the top thriller writers working today.
Good starting points: ‘In Pale Battalions’, ‘Into The Blue’, and ‘Borrowed Time’.
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