What you need to know before entering the pages of Saturday's Child, is that it is the first in a series of books centered around its protagonist, Cal Innes, an ex-con come private eye. (At my last check there are three other installments available or nearly available — Donkey Punch, No More Heroes and Beast of Burden). While Saturday's Child is Cal's first appearance in novel form, we have seen his type before- the "hard-boiled" private eye, with some distinctions in this case. He is English, not American, and does not carry a gun.  As well, at this early stage in his "career", he considers himself more amateur than professional.  But otherwise, the essential criteria are all here. Cal knows the streets. He has been in prison. At various points throughout his current assignment, he is threatened by various thugs and threatens various thugs. He receives a beating or two and gives a beating or two. He lusts, without much consequence, after a woman. He drinks, with little restraint, much alcohol. And he works, without much hope, on solving a case. All in all, it is the standard characterization of the tough-guy-hero-full-of-flaws-and-heart who goes to any length to find the truth, even if it might kill him, the favoured approach of the high priest of the hard-boiled genre, Raymond Chandler.

However, despite an adherence to the genre code, Banks has literary ambitions as well. For example, he divides narrator duties between Cal and his nemesis, Mo Tiernan. Mo is the violent and depraved son of the local crime boss who sends Cal on the mission of tracking down an ex-employee who ran off with some of his casino money and maybe something more.  And it is with Mo that Banks takes some risks. For starters, his narrative is delivered in a Manchester vernacular: "Bright lights, slick air, man. I were in me element. This were what a lad lived and breathed, like. Could kill you if you went too far down the line, but the secret for me was stamina and pills and water. Pills for owt. Up, down, left, right, screaming singing all through the night and a couple vallies for Lorraine Kelly in the morning before the big daytime nap."  (p. 68-69)

I should say that the above quotation is one of the tamer and more comprehensible excerpts of Mo's words. It does show though the amount of characterization and detail that this technique can convey. In a novel like this, where much of its structure and characterization can fall too neatly into formula, it's a welcome addition to have some local color inflected into the proceedings.

That said, there is still something of a "tacked-on" feeling to the Mo narrative and some other elements of the story that I found poorly developed. For instance, Banks fills in the back-story of Cal's previous incarceration at the start of each of the novel's three parts. These are short, well-written slices of prison life, but again they seem to me out of place and unnecessary. Like the Mo narrative, these pages would stand well on their own, but for me they disrupt what is one of my favorite parts of the hard-boiled novel reading experience- the sense of urgent rhythm that is sustained through intensity of plot and prose. And while Banks shows talent in his control of prose, it is his sense of structure and plot that I found weakest in this novel.

Which brings me back to what I shared at the start of this review. This book is the first in a series. For me, Ray Banks shows just enough promise in this first outing to suggest it will be have to be his later work that might approach the quality of a classic Chandler or even a modern Bruen. With Saturday's Child, he's just not there yet.

© 2008 Bruce MacDonald

Bruce MacDonald is a mental health case manager and co-facilitator of a concurrent disorders group working in Toronto, Ontario.

Keywords: fiction, review, dectective