refusalshoes

REFUSAL SHOES

Tony Saint

Serpent's Tail £10.00 tbo Rel: June 2003

Reviewed by Les Hurst


Tony Saint has been lucky - the world wants to know about immigration, and Saint was an immigration officer, like his protagonist Henry Brinks, more from necessity than choice. He writes about the things he has known - in this, his first novel, and in the articles he has been writing to coincide with its publication. On the wireless he has mentioned that this book has had to be vetted under the Official Secrets Act. As many of the scenes in the novel are also the scenes that he has described in the press I would hate to think about those events that have been censored and cut. Life in immigration is not fun.

REFUSAL SHOES is a very black and funny thriller.

I started and finished it the day it arrived, putting other things aside. And the extraordinary thing that Saint has done is to take material and write it twice - his newspaper articles are wry, but his novel is funny, and I never guessed that it would be from the press. The articles in the press, again, don't make it clear that REFUSAL SHOES is a thriller. I laughed out loud - sometimes laughing at bureaucracy, sometimes at grotesque criminality. This is also a bonus or a change for Serpent's Tail, who never seem to have found an author who is both noir and comic before. They need to make sure that they keep him - Christopher Brookmyre and Colin Bateman are okay, but Saint could be better. British crimlit has been missing a Hiaasen or Dave Barry and it needs to be encouraged.

RFUSAL SHOES follows Henry Brinks as he works a series of shifts through the weekend at Heathrow Airport's Terminal C, and by a chance slip of timing finding himself letting a Chinese gangster enter the country. As a quiet life is more important to Henry than the re- capture of the Triadist, Henry's attempts to delete his stamp from the entry system involve him in more and more byzantine struggles with. However, British bureaucracy would not be worthy of the name if its own pettinesses did not cause Henry equal problems. And then, when he has the key to the computer, Henry finds that he cannot delete the record from the system - it has been deleted already. Someone must know that he knows.

And Tony Saint's big kicker is this - it is not the capture of a rogue gangster that then drives Henry, it is still the drive for a quiet life.

Tony Saint seems to have been lucky - he has caught the attention of the press, and readers will enjoy the book. Clare Littleford's BEHOLDEN (Pocket Books), earlier this year, should have had a similar effect - she was another public servant writing her first novel, about the world, planning, that she knew - but BEHOLDEN seems to have fallen through the gaps. After reading REFUSAL SHOES someone in authority will perhaps stop laughing long enough to do something. Tony Saint, meanwhile, I hope, will be writing something just as good.