Review of The Cutting Crew by Steve Mosby (Orion, 2005)

Four police officers have decided to take the law into their own hands. If a suspect manages to wriggle free of a prosecution, then they dispense their own brand of justice. One case though has got under their skin. A young woman is found brutally murdered, but no suspect is identified. Four months on and the team have fallen apart, two of them leaving the police, one of them becoming obsessed with the case. Then he too is killed in a brutal fashion, beaten to death in the same house the young woman had been found. It is clear that the other three are also in danger. As they try to piece together why their friend has been slain, they start to undercover more information about the young woman and the art project she had been working on with her friends – exploring the myths of the city and how it seems like a living entity. Somehow the founding fathers of the city appear to live on and they want the cutting crew eliminated.

Steve Mosby’s The Cutting Crew is a crime novel with a twist. It’s not really science fiction, in that the book seems like it is in the contemporary era, though its timing is not stated, and it clearly set in this world. However, the nameless city seems other worldly to some degree, divided into sixteen districts, each named after an animal, and each with its own characteristics. Myth has it that the city was founded by eight brothers. Mosby’s narrative is dominated by two elements – the city and its geography and history, and interpersonal relationships. Both were well crafted, providing a textured, layered insight into the two principle characters – the city and the main character, Martin. The story itself is compelling, though it seems to lose its way a little in the middle. Towards the end, it twists in an unusual and fulfilling way, bringing the narrative to a satisfying conclusion. Overall, an unusual crime novel, with strong undercurrents of myth and legend.

The city is alive ...

The city is a central character in Steve Mosby's The Cutting Crew. He spends quite a bit of the narrative detailing the form, geography, history, myths and sense of place of the nameless city the story is set in. He uses the metaphor of the body a lot, talking about the city consisting of organs, muscles, arteries and so on - a living organic thing, pulsating with life. Here is a passage from near the beginning.

There were nights when he’d drive me out of the city and up into the hills nearby. We’d park and both look out over the buildings and the lights and the people below us, and it would seem to me that in some awful way the city was alive: that there was a dark heart flexing and thumping underneath the skin of concrete and soil. ... The more we talked and worked, the more I could sense the city’s heart beat. It made me feel powerless and awful and weak.

I was supposed to be in control of this city – this enormous creature that was bad from top to bottom – and it wanted none of it. Maybe it would let us get away with the little stuff, but the evil was too ingrained: any concerted attempt to dig it out would bring the buildings crashing down. That’s what Sean said: it was like the human body if you removed all the water – all you’d be left with is a pile of sand.

That was how he saw the city, and after a while that’s how I began to see it too. Partly it was because of the way things worked: everything was so orchestrated and coordinated that it was often difficult not to see a design under it all. But sometimes you only had to walk down the streets to start imagining them as veins and arteries, and on those occasions I often wondered if I could kneel down, press my hand to the pavement and feel the slow thud of the city’s pulse.

Cash or readers?

I'm visiting my brother in the North of England for the weekend. We've been in town shopping. I couldn't help ducking into two discount bookstores. The selection was limited and random, but I picked up Steve Mosby's The Cutting Crew for two pounds from one shop and a copy of Anarchy and Old Dogs for a pound from the other. A pound for a brand new book that actually had two pounds stamped on it in big letters on the front. I thought two pounds was a bargain. I always feel guilty buying books below cost as I want the author to be probably rewarded for their labour. I justify it to myself because I buy over 100 books a year, so a large chunk of my disposal income goes to authors and publishers, and I write a review of all books I read which might help persuade others to try their work.

Buying books at these prices got me thinking about authors and what is best from their perspective. I suspect that at two or one pounds the author is getting nothing or little in terms of recompense. So, is it best to sell fewer books but make more money, or to sell more books and have more readers rather than recompense? Cash or readers? I'd be readers, but then I'm trying to live off of book royalties. It would be interesting to get other views.