Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
This is how I like my noir fiction: no cops with unlikely hang-ups, no copycat serial killers, no ‘here-we-go-again’ plots. Olguín concentrates instead on villains and victims and several dollops of savage sex.
We’re in Buenos Aires. Kids are dying on the railway lines – playing chicken, it seems, though we soon learn that it’s no game: they’re being used in the way that cock-fight promoters use their chickens. For a small prize the kids compete in pairs to see who will jump first from the path of an incoming train. Some jump too late. But while they play this deadly game the big prize money is elsewhere, among the organisers and the big-money spectators, betting on the boys and lapping up the danger – since they’re not the ones in danger.
Enter journalist Veronica Rosenthal, on their trail. Having interviewed and seduced one of the traumatised train drivers she uses him to work herself into the rotten innards of the chicken game. Most of the boys, she finds, come from the poverty-ridden slums of Buenos Aires and are lured in via small-scale local football clubs where “What I’m about to offer you is only for really tough boys.” They think they’re tough. But trains are tougher.
This is a strong fast-moving story, the first in a series and already on TV in South America.
Translated by Miranda France
