THE BONE MACHINE

[Roger]

In his earlier novels like MARY'S PRAYER and CANDLELAND, Martyn Waits essentially opened out the social and political themes of Ted Lewis's novels and movies like GET CARTER - set in his native Newcastle. The references to T. Dan Smith and Thatcherism were spot on and complimented what retrospective crime writers like Jake Arnott and David Peace had done to map the processes shaping the world in which we live through crime fiction. But there's a new maturity and quality to the writing in the whole Joe Donovan series. It's slick without becoming anodine. Waits proves that the kind of social and political commentary that has inhabited British retrospective crime since OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH and LOOKING AFTER JO JO on TV (and which typify my novels such as HOLLYWOOD BOWL, ENEMY WITHIN and COOL BRITANNIA) can be opened out and revisited in contemporary crime fiction. This David Peace has also done in TOKIYO, YEAR ZERO, and tis I'm trying to do in BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, about the contemporary fascist underground in the UK.