What do you think?
Rate this book
Blood Circuit
1st NEL 1983 edition paperback vg++ book In stock shipped from our UK warehouse
- GenresHorror
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
1 person is currently reading
51 people want to read
About the author
Guy N. Smith
175 books297 followersI was born on November 21, 1939, in the small village of Hopwas, near Tamworth, Staffordshire, England. My mother was a pre-war historical novelist (E. M. Weale) and she always encouraged me to write.
I was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local weekly newspaper. Between 1952-57 I wrote 56 stories for them, many serialized. In 1990 I collated these into a book entitled Fifty Tales from the Fifties.
My father was a dedicated bank manager and I was destined for banking from birth. I accepted it but never found it very interesting. During the early years when I was working in Birmingham, I spent most of my lunch hours in the Birmingham gun quarter. I would have loved to have served an apprenticeship in the gun trade but my father would not hear of it.
Shooting (hunting) was my first love, and all my spare time was spent in this way. In 1961 I designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more, but I did not have the money to do this. I still use the Guy N. Smith short-barrelled magnum. During 1960-67 I operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business but this finished when my components suppliers closed down and I could no longer obtain components at competitive prices.
My writing in those days only concerned shooting. I wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology for which I contributed 18 stories between 1972-82.
In 1972 I launched my second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books. Originally my intention was to concentrate on this and maybe build it up to a full-time business which would enable me to leave banking. Although we still have this business, writing came along and this proved to be the vehicle which gave me my freedom.
I wrote a horror novel for the New English Library in 1974 entitled Werewolf by Moonlight. This was followed by a couple more, but it was Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched me as a writer. It was a bestseller, spawning five sequels, and was followed by another 60 or so horror novels through to the mid-1990's. Amicus bought the film rights to Crabs in 1976 and this gave me the chance to leave banking and by my own place, including my shoot, on the Black Hill.
The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1990 and still has an active membership. We hold a convention every year at my home which is always well attended.
Around this time I became Poland's best-selling author. Phantom Press published two GNS books each month, mostly with print runs of around 100,000.
I have written much, much more than just horror; crime and mystery (as Gavin Newman), and children's animal novels (as Jonathan Guy). I have written a dozen or so shooting and countryside books, a book on Writing Horror Fiction (A. & C. Black). In 1997 my first full length western novel, The Pony Riders was published by Pinnacle in the States.
With 100-plus books to my credit, I was looking for new challenges. In 1999 I formed my own publishing company and began to publish my own books. They did rather well and gave me a lot of satisfaction. We plan to publish one or two every year.
Still regretting that I had not served an apprenticeship in the gun trade, the best job of my life dropped into my lap in 1999 when I was offered the post of Gun Editor of The Countryman's Weekly, a weekly magazine which covers all field sports. This entails my writing five illustrated feature articles a week on guns, cartridges, deer stalking, big game hunting etc.
Alongside this we have expanded our mail order second hand crime fiction business, still publish a few books, and I find as much time as possible for shooting.
Jean, my wife, helps with the business. Our four children, Rowan, Tara, Gavin and Angus have all moved away from home but they visit on a regular basis.
I would not want to live anywhere other than m
I was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local weekly newspaper. Between 1952-57 I wrote 56 stories for them, many serialized. In 1990 I collated these into a book entitled Fifty Tales from the Fifties.
My father was a dedicated bank manager and I was destined for banking from birth. I accepted it but never found it very interesting. During the early years when I was working in Birmingham, I spent most of my lunch hours in the Birmingham gun quarter. I would have loved to have served an apprenticeship in the gun trade but my father would not hear of it.
Shooting (hunting) was my first love, and all my spare time was spent in this way. In 1961 I designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more, but I did not have the money to do this. I still use the Guy N. Smith short-barrelled magnum. During 1960-67 I operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business but this finished when my components suppliers closed down and I could no longer obtain components at competitive prices.
My writing in those days only concerned shooting. I wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology for which I contributed 18 stories between 1972-82.
In 1972 I launched my second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books. Originally my intention was to concentrate on this and maybe build it up to a full-time business which would enable me to leave banking. Although we still have this business, writing came along and this proved to be the vehicle which gave me my freedom.
I wrote a horror novel for the New English Library in 1974 entitled Werewolf by Moonlight. This was followed by a couple more, but it was Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched me as a writer. It was a bestseller, spawning five sequels, and was followed by another 60 or so horror novels through to the mid-1990's. Amicus bought the film rights to Crabs in 1976 and this gave me the chance to leave banking and by my own place, including my shoot, on the Black Hill.
The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1990 and still has an active membership. We hold a convention every year at my home which is always well attended.
Around this time I became Poland's best-selling author. Phantom Press published two GNS books each month, mostly with print runs of around 100,000.
I have written much, much more than just horror; crime and mystery (as Gavin Newman), and children's animal novels (as Jonathan Guy). I have written a dozen or so shooting and countryside books, a book on Writing Horror Fiction (A. & C. Black). In 1997 my first full length western novel, The Pony Riders was published by Pinnacle in the States.
With 100-plus books to my credit, I was looking for new challenges. In 1999 I formed my own publishing company and began to publish my own books. They did rather well and gave me a lot of satisfaction. We plan to publish one or two every year.
Still regretting that I had not served an apprenticeship in the gun trade, the best job of my life dropped into my lap in 1999 when I was offered the post of Gun Editor of The Countryman's Weekly, a weekly magazine which covers all field sports. This entails my writing five illustrated feature articles a week on guns, cartridges, deer stalking, big game hunting etc.
Alongside this we have expanded our mail order second hand crime fiction business, still publish a few books, and I find as much time as possible for shooting.
Jean, my wife, helps with the business. Our four children, Rowan, Tara, Gavin and Angus have all moved away from home but they visit on a regular basis.
I would not want to live anywhere other than m
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 11, 2025
Not sure I have a clue what this was about. Something to do with cars. Not Smith’s best…
June 8, 2013
Motor racing leaves me as cold as horse racing (and various other sports to be honest) so I was relying on Guy N Smith's undoubted ability to tell a good story regardless of the setting and I wasn't disappointed. The tale of intrigue, murder and possible supernatural intervention is fast and exciting and I enjoyed it despite the setting. I guess it would have got four stars if it hadn't been for the motor racing. On the other hand, if cars going round in circles and powerful engines is your thing then you will love this book. Guy N Smith proves again that he can tell a good exciting story around any setting. That's why I'm intent on reading everything he's written. A masterful author rising above my lack of interest in the subject.
September 24, 2024
I've been looking forward to 'Blood Circuit' for some time, not merely because I haven't read it in forever, but because, in the context of publication order, it feels like it was Guy's final resistance to being identified as just a horror author, a genre he never intended to become a home. The novels he wrote before he debuted in print weren't horror, 'Starlite' being a novel about a gamekeeper, 'Rebel Star' a footballing story and 'Dreamtime' science fiction. His first published book, 'Werewolf by Moonlight', was horror, but he followed it up with a set of porn digests, four Disney novelisations, a pair of thrillers and a war novel. Of his first twenty-one books, a mere seven, or only a third of them, could be counted as horror.
Sure, he then knocked out twenty horror novels on the trot, if we go by how they were labelled and marketed, but they weren't really all horror. Take the crabs out of 'Killer Crabs' and what's left is a pure thriller, which is pretty much what 'The Lurkers' was anyway, and a bunch of others are disaster novels with the horror aspect ramped up. In the background, the synopses he wrote that never made it to the writing stage were also often thrillers, especially 'Night of the Floods', which New English Library suggested he write as the follow up for his bestseller, 'Night of the Crabs', and its subsequent variants, all of which faded away before being written. It's pretty clear that, while he was good at writing horror, that isn't all he wanted to be known for.
So it made sense for him in 1983 to knock out a book that was written, published and identified down through the years as a thriller, but NEL clearly weren't fully committed to that premise. Sure, its spine reads "fiction" rather than "horror" but there aren't categories in the also-by list and, while there's little to suggest that it's another horror novel, there's little to suggest that it isn't either. The back cover blurb highlights "a chill fear", there's "death" in the tagline and the title is in traditional horror red. It also begins with a rather gruesome death, Craig Hammerton "baled into a pulped bloody square of flesh and bone", with a suggestion that it may be the latest example of the historical Hammerton Curse.
However, it proceeds firmly in thriller style. Hammerton was rich enough to own and run a motor racing team without a sponsor and his plans to race at Daytona now fall to his daughter, as his son was recently caught up in a drug smuggling scandal and then killed at Le Mans. Lee Hammerton takes up the mantle with vigour but, even though she has nightmares about the Hammerton Curse, she's convinced that their chief rival, Seamark, are out to get them. You see, Hammerton and Seamark had a joint catamaran cruise venture, years ago, that Seamark pulled out of before it became successful and he's held a grudge ever since.
So Lee hires Mark Slade as a consultant, meaning a cross between a private eye and a bodyguard. He knows a lot about the business, as a prominent driver who had come in second at Daytona by only half a length a year earlier, in a Seamark car. What Lee doesn't know is that the reason why he retired at the height of his fame is that he's lost his nerve. What we know, of course, is precisely how this is going to end even before we've read the book, because where else is that story going to go. Sure, he reiterates to her that he's not going to drive, but she soon persuades him to do a couple of laps on their test circuit and he promptly crashes, as someone's tampered with the tracking.
And so it begins and, while we know absolutely what Slade is going to end up doing in the final chapter, there are surprises here, ones which may explain why the book didn't succeed the way Guy had likely hoped. First is the fact that this is about American motorsport, so full of words like IROC, Riverside and Daytona that would have meant next to nothing to a British audience in 1983. The Hammerton team drive Chevy Camaros, just as little known in a country whose only commonplace American cars are Fords. What's strangest is that the folk who founded companies like Seamark and Hammerton were Formula 1 fans. It seems like an odd choice.
What's odder still is that this clearly wasn't written for an American audience, because most of it takes place in Hertfordshire. Initially, it's quintessential Smith, as Slade retires to the countryside to live in isolation, the old trope of the outsider clashing with the locals hinted at when he parks his car on a forestry road and can't be bothered to move it. Even in Hertfordshire, the home of the Hammerton estate and test circuit, we're still firmly in Smith country. Slade gets away from one of various attempts on his life by running across a field and hiding in a covert, where he's saved by gamekeepers with well-aimed shotguns.
Perhaps most surprisingly of all, given that this is supposedly about American motorsports, we don't even get to America until page 160 of 216 and, even then, we quickly encounter a LAPD cop who brandishes a truncheon and tells Slade to "piss off!" That hardly seems authentic to me! What should be noted here is that the actual racing, as much as Smith clearly did his research on tyres and lubricants, hardly matters. It's hardly a focus at all, the twenty-four-hour race at Daytona that serves as the finalé wrapped up in under two chapters; which, I should add, also wrap up everything else, including unmasking the inside man and explaining his motives.
What truly matters is fighting back. Someone, obviously Seamark, wants Hammerton to fail and they're doing all they can to make that happen. Lee Hammerton has the grit to resist and she hires well when she brings on Mark Slade, who may have lost his nerve on the racetrack but only becomes more determined with every shot fired at him and every punch thrown. It shouldn't surprise too much, then, if this rather reminds of 'The Black Knights', the first of Smith's two 'Truckers' novels, merely with less overt intimidation and a far more deadly approach to sabotage.
Racing car driver Mark Slade is a more glamorous take on trucker Mike Britton and the man behind Seamark, whose first name I never caught, is just as obviously the man behind the sabotage as ever Marcus Wheeldon was only six years earlier in 'The Black Knights'. He merely stays behind the scenes, letting others do his dirty work for him instead of throwing his weight around at Britton's trucking company. The biggest difference is a case of numbers: the cast of characters here is notably smaller than 'The Black Knights', even though it's also twice as long. That gives Smith plenty of opportunity to build his characters somewhat so that we can hazard a guess or six as to who the inside man is and why.
'Blood Circuit' isn't a bad book but it feels like an ill-advised one that never quite figured out what it wants to be. If it was meant to be a British thriller in the vein of 'The Black Knights', it needed to ditch all the American angles and stay recognisably British. If it was meant to break Smith in the larger U.S. market, it needed to get to the States a lot sooner and spend a lot more time actually racing. If the mystery was key, maybe it ought to have had a few more characters and a few more red herrings. If the characters were key, then perhaps they're all a little too stereotypical to make the book work on their own.
All those things, along with the inconsistent marketing that makes this thriller appear a little like another horror novel, meant that this attempt by Smith to vary his output, failed and he wouldn't get another chance at New English Library. His next twenty-five novels wouldn't merely be horror, they would also be more emphatically horror than quite a few of his previous twenty, including a couple more 'Crabs' books, another 'Sabat', sequels to 'The Sucking Pit', 'Thirst' and 'Deathbell' and a string of standalones, gradually shorter ones for NEL and an impressive set of thicker books for Sphere. Those would take him through to the nineties, when the changing market meant that he could finally diversify, writing thrillers, mysteries, children's books and even a western published in the U.S., a market he'd aimed at all his life.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in January 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Sure, he then knocked out twenty horror novels on the trot, if we go by how they were labelled and marketed, but they weren't really all horror. Take the crabs out of 'Killer Crabs' and what's left is a pure thriller, which is pretty much what 'The Lurkers' was anyway, and a bunch of others are disaster novels with the horror aspect ramped up. In the background, the synopses he wrote that never made it to the writing stage were also often thrillers, especially 'Night of the Floods', which New English Library suggested he write as the follow up for his bestseller, 'Night of the Crabs', and its subsequent variants, all of which faded away before being written. It's pretty clear that, while he was good at writing horror, that isn't all he wanted to be known for.
So it made sense for him in 1983 to knock out a book that was written, published and identified down through the years as a thriller, but NEL clearly weren't fully committed to that premise. Sure, its spine reads "fiction" rather than "horror" but there aren't categories in the also-by list and, while there's little to suggest that it's another horror novel, there's little to suggest that it isn't either. The back cover blurb highlights "a chill fear", there's "death" in the tagline and the title is in traditional horror red. It also begins with a rather gruesome death, Craig Hammerton "baled into a pulped bloody square of flesh and bone", with a suggestion that it may be the latest example of the historical Hammerton Curse.
However, it proceeds firmly in thriller style. Hammerton was rich enough to own and run a motor racing team without a sponsor and his plans to race at Daytona now fall to his daughter, as his son was recently caught up in a drug smuggling scandal and then killed at Le Mans. Lee Hammerton takes up the mantle with vigour but, even though she has nightmares about the Hammerton Curse, she's convinced that their chief rival, Seamark, are out to get them. You see, Hammerton and Seamark had a joint catamaran cruise venture, years ago, that Seamark pulled out of before it became successful and he's held a grudge ever since.
So Lee hires Mark Slade as a consultant, meaning a cross between a private eye and a bodyguard. He knows a lot about the business, as a prominent driver who had come in second at Daytona by only half a length a year earlier, in a Seamark car. What Lee doesn't know is that the reason why he retired at the height of his fame is that he's lost his nerve. What we know, of course, is precisely how this is going to end even before we've read the book, because where else is that story going to go. Sure, he reiterates to her that he's not going to drive, but she soon persuades him to do a couple of laps on their test circuit and he promptly crashes, as someone's tampered with the tracking.
And so it begins and, while we know absolutely what Slade is going to end up doing in the final chapter, there are surprises here, ones which may explain why the book didn't succeed the way Guy had likely hoped. First is the fact that this is about American motorsport, so full of words like IROC, Riverside and Daytona that would have meant next to nothing to a British audience in 1983. The Hammerton team drive Chevy Camaros, just as little known in a country whose only commonplace American cars are Fords. What's strangest is that the folk who founded companies like Seamark and Hammerton were Formula 1 fans. It seems like an odd choice.
What's odder still is that this clearly wasn't written for an American audience, because most of it takes place in Hertfordshire. Initially, it's quintessential Smith, as Slade retires to the countryside to live in isolation, the old trope of the outsider clashing with the locals hinted at when he parks his car on a forestry road and can't be bothered to move it. Even in Hertfordshire, the home of the Hammerton estate and test circuit, we're still firmly in Smith country. Slade gets away from one of various attempts on his life by running across a field and hiding in a covert, where he's saved by gamekeepers with well-aimed shotguns.
Perhaps most surprisingly of all, given that this is supposedly about American motorsports, we don't even get to America until page 160 of 216 and, even then, we quickly encounter a LAPD cop who brandishes a truncheon and tells Slade to "piss off!" That hardly seems authentic to me! What should be noted here is that the actual racing, as much as Smith clearly did his research on tyres and lubricants, hardly matters. It's hardly a focus at all, the twenty-four-hour race at Daytona that serves as the finalé wrapped up in under two chapters; which, I should add, also wrap up everything else, including unmasking the inside man and explaining his motives.
What truly matters is fighting back. Someone, obviously Seamark, wants Hammerton to fail and they're doing all they can to make that happen. Lee Hammerton has the grit to resist and she hires well when she brings on Mark Slade, who may have lost his nerve on the racetrack but only becomes more determined with every shot fired at him and every punch thrown. It shouldn't surprise too much, then, if this rather reminds of 'The Black Knights', the first of Smith's two 'Truckers' novels, merely with less overt intimidation and a far more deadly approach to sabotage.
Racing car driver Mark Slade is a more glamorous take on trucker Mike Britton and the man behind Seamark, whose first name I never caught, is just as obviously the man behind the sabotage as ever Marcus Wheeldon was only six years earlier in 'The Black Knights'. He merely stays behind the scenes, letting others do his dirty work for him instead of throwing his weight around at Britton's trucking company. The biggest difference is a case of numbers: the cast of characters here is notably smaller than 'The Black Knights', even though it's also twice as long. That gives Smith plenty of opportunity to build his characters somewhat so that we can hazard a guess or six as to who the inside man is and why.
'Blood Circuit' isn't a bad book but it feels like an ill-advised one that never quite figured out what it wants to be. If it was meant to be a British thriller in the vein of 'The Black Knights', it needed to ditch all the American angles and stay recognisably British. If it was meant to break Smith in the larger U.S. market, it needed to get to the States a lot sooner and spend a lot more time actually racing. If the mystery was key, maybe it ought to have had a few more characters and a few more red herrings. If the characters were key, then perhaps they're all a little too stereotypical to make the book work on their own.
All those things, along with the inconsistent marketing that makes this thriller appear a little like another horror novel, meant that this attempt by Smith to vary his output, failed and he wouldn't get another chance at New English Library. His next twenty-five novels wouldn't merely be horror, they would also be more emphatically horror than quite a few of his previous twenty, including a couple more 'Crabs' books, another 'Sabat', sequels to 'The Sucking Pit', 'Thirst' and 'Deathbell' and a string of standalones, gradually shorter ones for NEL and an impressive set of thicker books for Sphere. Those would take him through to the nineties, when the changing market meant that he could finally diversify, writing thrillers, mysteries, children's books and even a western published in the U.S., a market he'd aimed at all his life.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in January 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews