Gangster Girl

Maria Barrett was one of two lucky winners chosen to attend the forthcoming Old Peculier Crime Writers Festival in Harrogate this year (July 21-24) As part of the deal we are making our two bloggers sing for their supper by reviewing some of the author’s who will be featuring at the festival.

Review

From the opening page of ‘Gangster Girl’, Dreda Say Mitchell plunges us pell mell into a dark and violent word of organised crime and police corruption. Her heroine, Daisy, is a mass of contradictions; she is a geezer bird, a working class girl working as a solicitor; she is at once tough and vulnerable, finding herself out of her depth but having to cope in a world she thought she had long left behind. Despite being a loner, Daisy has more connections than Kevin Bacon. At chambers there’s her best friend, a boss to be wary of and a paternal mentor; at home, a nice if slightly uninspiring boyfriend, just around the corner her adoptive mother, and, never far away, an extended family of matriarchs, sisters who are certainly doing it for themselves. As if that didn’t make Christmas expensive enough, her long lost biological family intrude into her life, and it quickly emerges that Daisy also has a dead Dad who won’t lie down. Add to that a range of secrets, personal and familial, and a quest that she part sets herself and is part obliged to take part in at the point of a gun, and you may wonder how Daisy has time to fall in love and go to work. Well, she manages one of these anyway.

Despite all that is going on, I was a little resistant to Mitchell’s book at first. While the writing is mostly very fresh it can sometimes be clichéd. In addition, the boss is called Randall and the very soon deceased mentor is Hopkirk. This was distracting. Moreover, it would be great if Mitchell felt able to trust her reader; there are some great one-liners but there is a tendency to hammer them home. As an example: on the news that ‘Basher Babs’ is to be named as the new commissioner of New Scotland Yard, Daisy’s boyfriend comments that ‘She’ll be the first police chief to wear women’s clothes since J Edgar Hoover.’ I guffawed at this. Unfortunately, this is followed up by some clunky explanation; ‘A sad smile crept across Daisy’s face as an image of the long dead former head of the FBI and the rumours he liked to doll himself up in women’s clothes’. This amount of exposition for an amusing aside kills the joke and is unnecessary. The reader will get these references; if they don’t they will work it out; and if they still don’t they will skip it without a backward glance as long as it’s not integral to the plot.
Mitchell’s characters are very compelling though, from Daisy herself all the way through to the arch villainess Stella King, played in my head by Ann Mitchell. (I also fell head over heels in love with action hero Ricky Smart, and still feel a little guilty for cheating on my long term fictional crush Archie Goodwin.) In fact, this ability to bring you into the world of the character kept me reading up to the point where I honestly couldn’t stop reading if I tried. Mitchell’s great skill is in her fast pace, the action literally bowls along, and the reader is presented with cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger. Sometimes you know where it’s going, sometimes you don’t, but you always want to know how it’s going to get there. Chapter ends left me breathless and I always needed to start the next one straight away – far from being a read before bed it soon became a read instead of bed.

While the writing is not flawless the thriller element comes pretty close and I could really see this making a really good teleplay. Scenes flit very quickly, and much of the action is very visual. For me Mitchell is less the successor to gangland author Martina Cole and more the successor to Kay Mellor or Linda La Plante. Gangster Girl would make a really good series; as it is it’s a great holiday book – but whatever you do, don’t start reading it unless you have time to finish it. Wide eyed, breathless, and very possibly in one sitting.

About Maria

Maria Barrett has been an avid fan of crime fiction from an early age. Her first loves are the queens of English crime fiction, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. However her taste is catholic; she has just finished rereading the works of the great Raymond Chandler and, in her opinion, the even greater Dashiell Hammett. Other favourites include Rex Stout – she has collected all of the 54 Nero Wolfe books and is more than a little in love with his sidekick, Archie Goodwin – and would give her eye teeth to get her hands on the rare short story ‘Corsage’. She is also a fan of the visceral James Ellroy, not to mention Highsmith, Poe, Wilkie Collins and of course Conan Doyle. Maria is a lecturer in performing arts management at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and a PhD candidate at Warwick Centre for Cultural Policy, researching into audiences. She is a regular theatre reviewer for Defnetmedia.

Maria is very excited to be one of the official bloggers for Theakston’s Crime Writing Festival 2011, alongside Keith B Walters. She has started a special blog for the occasion at angelvane.wordpress.com/. Maria is regular on Twitter @MariaBarrett, as is her beautiful 4 year old daughter, @smallgirltweets.