Review: NO MORE HEROES by Ray Banks
NO MORE HEROES, the third novel by Ray Banks to feature sometime PI Cal Innes, finds Cal serving eviction notices for Plummer, a slum landlord. Cal spars and bickers with his colleague, Daft Frank, is as offensive to Plummer as he can be and still keep his job, and just tries to get on with life without ending up too hurt.
But one eviction job turns into something very different, and Cal ends up a local hero after rescuing a child from a house that’s been set on fire. Cal walks out of his job, but ends up taking Plummer’s money again to investigate whether the English National Socialists are behind the arson, and whether there are more burnings to come. The investigation is hampered by the enthusiastic help of Daft Frank, a student protest against Plummer’s business, a looming race-riot, and Cal’s ever-present struggle with his back pain. The amount of codeine he takes is getting out of hand (try Tramadol Cal, it’s better). Cal justifies this a number of times throughout the novel by talking about his ‘medical condition’, but Banks very deftly makes Cal’s self-pity and dependency come into sharper and sharper relief, and the other characters - and the reader - can see what Cal cannot or will not see for himself.
Innes makes a very reluctant hero. He’d rather be at home with a bottle of vodka, and doesn’t have a lot of time for most of the people he meets in the novel. And yet for all his cynicism, there’s a faint echo of Chandler’s man on the mean streets who is not himself mean, and never more than at the point in NO MORE HEROES when Cal decides the hell with it, someone’s got to do something so it might as well be him.
Having just moaned about locations, it’s good to see that Banks offers a Manchester which is vivid and sharply drawn, and the world of slumlords, dodgy backstreet garages and racist politics is well-drawn and convincing. Banks resists descending into caricature: the plot, characters and setting are compelling and drive the story on, but the novel still tells the truth about what twenty-first century Britain can be like. It’s good to see writing like this which shows that you can tell a story that keeps the reader turning the pages, without trying to pile high-concept on high-concept to the point at which reality quietly excuses itself and leaves the room. It would be a mistake though to think that this means NO MORE HEROES is po-faced social commentary , as there’s a strong thread of humour running right throughout the novel. This is particularly effective for often being so well understated.
We could perhaps have done with seeing a little more of the characters who turn out to be behind the fire; that we don’t does make them a little opaque, and harder for the author to make their motivation convincing as it could be. First person narration always always makes this harder to achieve though, and as Cal’s voice is one of the best things about the novel, maybe it’s a trade-off worth making, at least in part.
There’s a shocking surprise in the ending, and I’m looking forward to seeing what implications it has for the next Cal Innes novel, and how Banks handles this, because things will never be quite the same for Cal. A brave move, and one that steps aside from some of the usual cliches that the genre can throw out for effect.
While I’ve enjoyed the previous novels, there’s something different about NO MORE HEROES. This is a writer who has really found his voice - there’s a confidence about the writing that shines through. Ray Banks is in total control of his characters, his plot, he’s writing at the top of his game, and NO MORE HEROES shows that on every page.