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Talk down
On the day he decides to give up teaching beginners how to fly small aircraft and accepts a job as co-pilot with a major airline, Keith Kerr does two things. He punches his boss in the nose and brings on the man's fatal rupture, and, while flying home, he overhears a woman screaming over his radio. Nursing sister Ann Moore has gone up for a flight with her friend Roy Bazzard in a small single-engine craft--and suddenly Roy has conked out, perhaps dead, leaving her marooned in space. Ann has only been in a plane once before, a big passenger job. After her first hysteria, which Keith hears, she finally subsides enough so that ground control can talk to her. Keith is nearby in an identical plane and will try to talk her down. Keith is low on fuel, but for the spread of the novel he instructs her in the simpler arts of flying and how to land. Will she make it and will Keith's fuel hold out?
288 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 22, 2025
Brian Lecomber’s Talk Down is one of those novels that manages to be both faintly ridiculous and oddly gripping, too far-fetched to be wholly convincing, but too entertaining to be dismissed. Its premise — a passenger forced to land an aeroplane after the pilot is incapacitated — is the kind of scenario one might expect in pulp adventure, and yet it is also, uncannily, something that did occur in reality. The famous Humberside incident in the twenty-first century, when a passenger, guided by air traffic control and an RAF Sea King pilot, successfully brought down a light aircraft, demonstrated that life can outstrip fiction in its ability to terrify and to astonish. To read Talk Down in the shadow of that reality is to see a work that is prophetic in conception, though uneven in execution: a novel that lurches between authentic technical detail and melodramatic contrivance, but which nevertheless delivers suspense enough to make it worth reading.
Lecomber’s background in aviation lends his writing a veneer of technical credibility. He knows his cockpit layouts, his instrument panels, the rhythms of radio exchanges. At its best, the novel allows the reader to inhabit the panic of an ordinary passenger confronted with the sheer terror of being thrust into the pilot’s seat, the world outside reduced to cloud, dials, and imminent catastrophe. These are moments when the fiction brushes against the real texture of aviation and begins to feel plausible. Yet Lecomber cannot resist ornamenting this terror with melodramatic excess. Subplots proliferate — old lovers, rivalries, conspiracies — until the clean terror of the accident becomes muddied by narrative clutter. It is as though he did not quite trust the purity of the scenario itself to carry the suspense, and in gilding the lily he weakened the bloom.
From the perspective of theory, the novel seems caught between Virilio’s “integral accident” and Adorno’s “culture industry.” Virilio reminds us that every technology carries within it its accident: the invention of the aeroplane is the invention of the crash. Talk Down is constructed around precisely this logic, but instead of allowing the accident to unfold in its banal horror, Lecomber insists on transforming it into melodrama. The true horror — the trembling voice of a passenger in contact with calm controllers, the knowledge that tonnes of machinery are hanging by the thread of human inexperience — is itself enough to chill. But the novel overlays this truth with unnecessary intrigue. In doing so, it exemplifies what Adorno condemned: the commodification of shock into entertainment, the reduction of rupture into cliché.
And yet, despite this dilution, the book remains entertaining. It is what one might call “old school” suspense, of the kind that depends not on elaborate conspiracies or cybernetic networks but on a simple, visceral premise: an ordinary person placed in extraordinary jeopardy. Its very datedness becomes part of its charm. In the current climate, saturated with thrillers that collapse under the weight of labyrinthine plotting, there is something refreshing in the sheer bluntness of Talk Down. The ordinariness of its protagonist, the claustrophobic focus on the cockpit, the dependence on radio voices and instrument panels — all this carries a fascination of its own.
Compared to Nevil Shute’s No Highway, which combined aviation knowledge with psychological seriousness, or to Alistair MacLean’s endurance dramas, or even to Frederick Forsyth’s geopolitically inflected thrillers, Lecomber’s novel is slighter, more theatrical. But slighter does not mean valueless. It exists in the curious middle zone between manual and melodrama, and that hybridity gives it a certain quirky appeal. One might scoff at the loose ends, at the clumsy subplots, at the dialogue that sometimes reads more like Hollywood than Heathrow, but one turns the pages nonetheless. The book knows how to sustain suspense, even when it fritters away coherence.
The British context matters here. When reality produced a genuine talk down at Humberside, what chilled was not melodrama but ordinariness: the calm voice of air traffic control, the quiet insistence of instruction, the sheer contingency of survival. Lecomber, in dramatising, loses some of this authenticity. Yet the fact that he imagined the scenario at all gives the novel a retrospective weight. It is, in its way, prophetic. That it does not fully live up to its potential is disappointing, but it is hardly a disaster. It remains a curiosity worth attention, not because it is flawless, but because it captures something in advance of reality.
Three stars, then, seems the fairest judgement. The novel is flawed, riddled with contrivances, burdened with loose ends. But it is also entertaining, occasionally gripping, and above all uncannily prescient. Its very unevenness makes it interesting: it is too good to be bad, and too bad to be good. It occupies the middle zone, the liminal space between accident and melodrama, between plausibility and spectacle. In the end, it reminds us of Adorno’s suspicion: that culture will always commodify accident into cliché. But it also reminds us, against Adorno, that even cliché can be entertaining when handled with sufficient pace. That is not triumph, but neither is it failure. It is, simply, three stars.
Lecomber’s background in aviation lends his writing a veneer of technical credibility. He knows his cockpit layouts, his instrument panels, the rhythms of radio exchanges. At its best, the novel allows the reader to inhabit the panic of an ordinary passenger confronted with the sheer terror of being thrust into the pilot’s seat, the world outside reduced to cloud, dials, and imminent catastrophe. These are moments when the fiction brushes against the real texture of aviation and begins to feel plausible. Yet Lecomber cannot resist ornamenting this terror with melodramatic excess. Subplots proliferate — old lovers, rivalries, conspiracies — until the clean terror of the accident becomes muddied by narrative clutter. It is as though he did not quite trust the purity of the scenario itself to carry the suspense, and in gilding the lily he weakened the bloom.
From the perspective of theory, the novel seems caught between Virilio’s “integral accident” and Adorno’s “culture industry.” Virilio reminds us that every technology carries within it its accident: the invention of the aeroplane is the invention of the crash. Talk Down is constructed around precisely this logic, but instead of allowing the accident to unfold in its banal horror, Lecomber insists on transforming it into melodrama. The true horror — the trembling voice of a passenger in contact with calm controllers, the knowledge that tonnes of machinery are hanging by the thread of human inexperience — is itself enough to chill. But the novel overlays this truth with unnecessary intrigue. In doing so, it exemplifies what Adorno condemned: the commodification of shock into entertainment, the reduction of rupture into cliché.
And yet, despite this dilution, the book remains entertaining. It is what one might call “old school” suspense, of the kind that depends not on elaborate conspiracies or cybernetic networks but on a simple, visceral premise: an ordinary person placed in extraordinary jeopardy. Its very datedness becomes part of its charm. In the current climate, saturated with thrillers that collapse under the weight of labyrinthine plotting, there is something refreshing in the sheer bluntness of Talk Down. The ordinariness of its protagonist, the claustrophobic focus on the cockpit, the dependence on radio voices and instrument panels — all this carries a fascination of its own.
Compared to Nevil Shute’s No Highway, which combined aviation knowledge with psychological seriousness, or to Alistair MacLean’s endurance dramas, or even to Frederick Forsyth’s geopolitically inflected thrillers, Lecomber’s novel is slighter, more theatrical. But slighter does not mean valueless. It exists in the curious middle zone between manual and melodrama, and that hybridity gives it a certain quirky appeal. One might scoff at the loose ends, at the clumsy subplots, at the dialogue that sometimes reads more like Hollywood than Heathrow, but one turns the pages nonetheless. The book knows how to sustain suspense, even when it fritters away coherence.
The British context matters here. When reality produced a genuine talk down at Humberside, what chilled was not melodrama but ordinariness: the calm voice of air traffic control, the quiet insistence of instruction, the sheer contingency of survival. Lecomber, in dramatising, loses some of this authenticity. Yet the fact that he imagined the scenario at all gives the novel a retrospective weight. It is, in its way, prophetic. That it does not fully live up to its potential is disappointing, but it is hardly a disaster. It remains a curiosity worth attention, not because it is flawless, but because it captures something in advance of reality.
Three stars, then, seems the fairest judgement. The novel is flawed, riddled with contrivances, burdened with loose ends. But it is also entertaining, occasionally gripping, and above all uncannily prescient. Its very unevenness makes it interesting: it is too good to be bad, and too bad to be good. It occupies the middle zone, the liminal space between accident and melodrama, between plausibility and spectacle. In the end, it reminds us of Adorno’s suspicion: that culture will always commodify accident into cliché. But it also reminds us, against Adorno, that even cliché can be entertaining when handled with sufficient pace. That is not triumph, but neither is it failure. It is, simply, three stars.
June 19, 2021
A pretty decent old school suspense story with way too many loose ends left untied - for my taste.
July 25, 2019
Just a little far fetched, but entertaining.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews