Book review †cold blood Essay

Book review of nipping Blood by the author crowd together Fleming The surname (he is Ians nephew) and frosty title might lead ane to expect something purely mercantile and hard-boiled of James Flemings icy Blood. But this sequel to flannel Blood, though in the thriller genre, is both more idiosyncratic and awkward than that. The footstep is set on page one with the hero-narrators introductory self-description I, Charlie Doig half dozen foot two, strong across the shoulders and through the loins. Set during the Russian conversion and its bloody aftermath, this is as much tongue-in-cheek 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 muffin beetle. We are briefly whisked back to his ancestral home in Russia his livestock is exotically cosmopolitan for a whirlwind reprise of some of the principal elements of White Blood, notab ly the rape and torture (so hideous that Doig feels compelled to put her break through 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 pursuit of Glebov across civil-warravaged Russia. prototypic stop is St Petersburg, where, with his Mongolian sidekick, Kobi, he witnesses the Bolshevik seizure of power and discovers that Glebov has beseem one of the revolutions leaders, up there with Lenin and Trotsky. With the struggle of red ink v White spreading across the land, Doig is forced to step up a gear in his pursuit of vengeance, assembling a farrago troop of henchmen and women and commandeering an armoured train. Thus equipped, Doig will take on not only Glebov, but the whole 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. theres a cache of stolen tsarist gold that ever yone 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 also proves to be up to no good. There are any number of colourful smudge parts that flit into the narrative, command attention for a couple of pages and hence 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 grounds moments when the grip is relaxed, the better to sock the reader with the unexpected. Flemings relentless goose egg and garrulous black humour 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 potty 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 Flem ing.