The Scholar of Extortion

Reg Gadney

Faber £12.99hbk Rel June 2003 - pbk Dec 2004 £6.99

Reviewed by L. J. Hurst

Piracy is big business - not bootlegged CDs, but pirates as in the old days, boarding ships, slaughtering crew, stealing and dealing in the cargo. Quite a lot of people are writing about it - James Hall's OFF THE CHART looked at the American end of it, and so did Jeff Gulvin's THE PROCESSION as I recall. James Hall had a would-be entrepreneur who unfortunately never found himself unable to move into the profitable worlds of the Pacific and the South China Seas. With British connections to the Straits, Shanghai and Hong Kong there are many more openings for a British author. Reg Gadney has moved in.
Gadney knows that Britain has maritime connections through finance, management, colonial history and international law. His protagonist, Alan Rosslyn, former customs officer and now international security consultant can find as much business as he wants. What Rosslyn does not want is to have his former friends from Hong Kong murdered, tortured, traumatised, and he does not need to have to keep his promise to look after his friend's daughter. Rosslyn - and he does not know it - does not need to take work from international criminals and their psychopathic henchman. Unfortunately, that is what happens. Things happen.
Unfortunately for all of us a family of Chinese businessmen, the Zhenteungs, want to move their business headquarters to London. And unfortunately, too, they are prepared to be very helpful to figures in the British government in their attempts to gain British nationality. However, the brothers have not foreseen the falling out between them, nor the unintended consequences of "The Scholar of Extortion"'s efforts on behalf of two brothers to re-establish cordial relations with their third. That attempt is a large car bomb in the middle of London, which overshadows Rosslyn's claims to security management, as clients tend to doubt the abilities of men who cannot stop them being murdered. And somewhere along the line MI6 becomes involved, as Rosslyn knows the CIA already are, not to much greater success.
So Rosslyn continues with his dogged attempts - more dog than success unfortunately - while the Scholar, Terajima, continues with his practises of using people and then burning them alive. Ships sail on, storms rage, helicopters fly in and out. Missiles fire. It all goes on.
And on.
And on.
There are 158 chapters in THE SCHOLAR OF EXTORTION and some of them are not much longer than these paragraphs. In some cases action continues non-stop from chapter to chapter, while others are discontinuous. The whole effect is that of reading the notes or draft of a novel, rather the completed object. Chapter 38 begins with two paragraphs which are alternate versions of the same thing - even proof-reading has not removed them. Ironically, though, they also reveal that neither improves on the other, reinforcing one's sense of dissatisfaction. At its best this is one to read, and to re-form in the memory. The story might be quite good, the telling is not.

At times this tale is a little too brutal in detailing the plight of the chickens caught in the world of intensive-farming. Other times Simms’s humour pulls this novel from the darkness and back into the light. It reminds me a little of the early work of Patricia Highsmith, as it deals with amoral people trapped in an amoral situation, trying to find a way out of their plight, and where adherence to rules plays no part in the resolution. A very fast and brutal read and as I have mentioned in the past, Chris Simms is a rapidly developing talent in the world of crime-fiction. Oh, for the wings of any bird, other than a battery hen.