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Pecking Order

Chris Simms

Hutchinson £12.99 hbk

Rel Feb 2004

Reviewed by Ali Karim

A very robust and creepy tale that had me riveted for an evening with dark characters that still reverberate in my head. Simms debuted early this year with the highly regarded ‘Outside the White Lines’ which involved the violent chase for a serial killer fueled with road-rage. This time around, we have a curious black as night tale about a series of murders plotted against the backdrop of academia, and the frightful world of the battery farmed chicken.

The title is a very clever play on words, as it not only indicates birds, but also hints at the social strata that forms the backdrop for this dark tale. A university lecturer Eric Maudsley meets and befriends the sub-normal and conscienceless battery-farm laborer Roy Bull, nicknamed ‘Rubble’. Rubble’s lack of intelligence is more than compensated for in terms of his strength and brutality, the former being honed by his life on the chicken farm, which becomes an outlet for his sadism as well as (in one harrowing section) his own sexual needs. Eric sees that Rubble could help him in a problem that is set to destroy his own academic future. The problem now, is how to control the child-like Rubble? Soon the plot is hatched (pun intended), and the murders start. Rubble becomes a pawn in a game that has far wider implications than his under-developed mind could comprehend. Rubble seeks refuge by telling a telephone fortune-teller about his new-found role, while some students start wondering about the complex character Eric Maudlsey.

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.