Synopsis
Chris is an ordinary guy working in an off-licence in suburban England and living in the local YMCA. Both are just stop-gap measures...at least that's what he tells himself.
Then one day Chris is mugged taking the shop's money to the bank, and his life is suddenly turned upside down.
As he sets out to unravel the identity of his attacker, Chris is drawn into the dangerous and seedy underworld of suburban London, whilst at the same time trying to make up his mind about the attentions of three women.
Reviews
Utilitarian prose and a plot gently underscored with irony work together to wonderful effect in this debut British crime novel. Chris, who lives at a YMCA in suburban London, gets mugged making the nightly deposit for the liquor store where he works. Dashy is the hapless mugger who gets away?without the cash. Chris tracks Dashy down at a local bookie's but not before Dashy has told his tale to another unemployed fellow named Kevin. With more brains than Dashy, Kevin takes charge as the twosome make plans for further escapades. But Chris and Dashy are also talking to each other by now. In the meantime, a laid-back copper named Morgan monitors the whole situation. Chris finds two new women: Liz at the bus stop and Rachel where he works. Kevin takes up with Eunice at the local pub. The author sets his tale in an unremarkable setting and inserts an easy, insidious criminality into three drab and seemingly uneventful lives. Smalltime is a finely crafted study of transitions?between city and suburb, between youth and adulthood, and between getting by and going under. With the addition of a prose flourish or two, Raine could easily join the ranks of John Harvey and Michael Dibdin.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
On his way to stick the day's receipts from his off-license in the night depository, Chris (who's too small-time even to have a last name) gets himself mugged. The thief doesn't get away with anything, but he leaves Chris bruised and sore and determined to identify him, even though he didn't get much of a look. The stage seems set for a classic game of cat-and-mouse, but first-timer Raine has something much more offbeat in mind. Leo Dash, the unsuccessful mugger, is a melancholic ex-truck loader on the dole who's still dazed by the recent suicide of his kid brother. And Chris is no angel himself, with a long history of stealing from his employers; a more recent inability to decide between the favors of a film company secretary and the girl at the off- license--so that he's been enjoying them both--and a half-baked plan to rob one of the shops at the local mall. The real joker in this pack, though, is Dashy's mate Kevin Jenkins, whose sexual ethics make Chris's look courtly, and whose one goal in life is evidently duplicating Dashy's attempted mugging, with a more lucrative result. An improbable friendship sprouts between depressive Dashy and struggling Chris, one step away from the dole himself, but nobody will be fooled into expecting either of them to escape their tight little island. Raine's plotting wobbles too uncontrollably to confirm the hints of a downscale Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell. But there's nothing false or tentative about his lightning sketch of his proles' weary desperation. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In documentary-style prose that effectively echoes the blighted landscape of lower-middle-class suburban London, Raine tells a haunting story of frustrated ambitions and shrunken dreams. Chris, Kevin, and Dashy occupy different levels on the lower rungs of the social ladder: Chris has a dead-end job and lives in the YMCA; Kevin, once a truck driver, is now on the dole but hoping to get back behind the wheel; Dashy, permanently on the dole, hopes only to pick a few winners at the races. Crime brings them together when Dashy mugs Chris, who tracks down Dashy, who points the finger at Kevin. Soon the trio, strangled by the smallness of their lives and dreams, are swirling ever downward toward a violent finale. Like the Dustin Hoffman film Straight Time, Raine's novel establishes the humanity of its characters by sharing the often-pathetic details of their daily lives. There is no preaching here, no using crime as the stuff of adventure; instead, there is only gritty, gray, suffocating reality. Bill Ott
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