AudioBooksReview: Lennox

read by Sean Barrett

The honed wit and practised style of Craig Russell’s writing are nigh on perfect in The Deep Dark Sleep – tartan noir at its best. And at AudioBooksReview we are impatient for the next instalment – and the next.

Sean Barrett’s reading is simply superlative. Your reviewer has the books, and it is good to see the narrative on the printed page, but for the full experience there is no substitute to having these dark, tangled tales read to you in a Scots brogue that rolls off the pages like the smog of mid-twentieth-century Glasgow.

The protagonist of Russell’s stories – Lennox – is the archetypal private investigator. With a dogged world-weariness that only a former special services operative from the Second World War can truly muster, Lennox is quick-witted, foolishly courageous and as much a crusader for moral truth as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. He may seem less than scrupulous in his fortuitous couplings, but in the burgeoning romance with his landlady Fiona White his intentions appear to be, for once, effortlessly honourable.

When the remains of a man are dredged up sleeping the deep dark sleep at the bottom of the River Clyde, an initialled gold cigarette case seems unequivocally to identify him as ‘Gentleman’ Joe Strachan – Glasgow’s most notorious armed robber and the suspected killer of a police officer during an audacious and highly lucrative raid on the Empire Exhibition. The vicious late criminal’s twin daughters engage Lennox to establish who has been sending them cash every year on the anniversary of the infamous Empire Exhibition heist. Could their father really be alive and have lived incognito for so many years? The worst villains in Glasgow crawl out of the woodwork anxious also to know whether the body really is Strachan’s. As the investigation escalates, someone tries very hard to warn Lennox off the case with shows of deadly brutality. At the same time, Lennox is investigating a particularly seedy blackmail case, which is paying way over the odds. Could there be a link between the cases that Lennox is missing? Lennox has never before made so many dangerous enemies nor been so many times so near to death.

Russell is thoroughly self-assured and never dull. Amid a bleak and deadly Glasgow, full of mean streets and even meaner characters, there are bright flashes of humour. And style by the bucket load. Brilliant and unnerving, The Deep Dark Sleep is assured to become a classic of the genre.

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Buy The Deep Dark Sleep

read by Sean Barrett

Lennox, Craig Russell’s Canadian-Scottish private investigator, clearly owes a great deal to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The title of the third Lennox novel, The Deep Dark Sleep would certainly seem to confirm the Chandleresque homage. Marlowe and Lennox share a dry, witty reflectiveness on their respective stomping grounds (Glasgow and Los Angeles). Both detectives have an uneasy relationship with their respective police forces and tangle with the gangsters of their particular era and locale. Both appear to maintain a code of honour quite unexpected amongst the hard-bitten, cynical characters who populate their driven, thoughtful crime novels.

In Dead Men and BrokenHearts Lennox has been hired to work on two new cases: one by a woman who thinks her husband is being unfaithful, the other investigating the disappearance of a union official and a large amount of cash. Against the political backdrop of Suez and the Hungarian uprising, there is an abundance of period detail that makes the whole thing brim with verisimilitude. Everything seems to revolve around ‘Tanglewood’ – the name overheard by the suspicious wife who sets Lennox off on his goose chase at the opening of the book. But is it a surname, a business, a town? Before the dramatic and enthralling climax, Lennox is forced to go on the run, fugitive from the Glasgow Constabulary, aided and protected by Twinkletoes, the heavy from the very first Lennox novel and whose speciality is extracting information from unfortunates by clipping off their toes with a bolt cutter. The ubiquitous smog, mystifying mistaken identities, elusive Secret Service personnel, shadowy and sadistic European politics and morally redundant post-war malaise all inhabit this entertaining and intriguing narrative, superbly brought to life by the incomparable Sean Barrett.

In this, the fourth in the Lennox series of novels, the investigator seriously plans a new life back in his native Canada where he can put everything behind him – removing himself from the ‘dead men and broken hearts’ that is said in the book to sum up Lennox’s life past and present. I, for one, hope he changes his mind.

This series is a great find. Spread the word: you will definitely fall under the Lennox spell.

Superb.

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Buy Dead Men and BrokenHearts

The Deep Dark Sleep by Craig Russell

Dead Men and Broken Hearts by Craig Russell