Having been greatly impressed by Kenneth Cook's most renowned novel, Wake in Fright, when I spotted a green Penguin paperback of another book of his, Chain of Darkness, I snapped it up. I looked the book up and found relatively little discussion of it online, while the Goodreads reviews are pretty negative. But you do have to take some Goodreads reviews with more than a pinch of salt.
Suffice to say that I really enjoyed this book, which like Wake in Fright is a short and snappy read. It's also very well-written. Essentially it counterpoints the experiences of a career criminal called Johnson and a TV reporter, Ben Davidson. The brilliant opening sentence sets the tone of the book admirably: 'Johnson was confused and he probably didn't even mean particularly to hurt the policeman, but he killed him just the same.'
Johnson is a doomed protagonist, rather like someone James M. Cain might have created years earlier, while in his own way Davidson is, despite his journalistic talents, fated to have his career hemmed in by restrictions that he despises. We can anticipate roughly what is going to happen but I don't think that's problematic, because the story is told with pace and also with authority. That authority derives mainly from Cook's knowledge of the TV world, but also from a real life case which influenced his story.
There is one excellent online essay about the book, in which Geoffrey Luck describes the background to the creation of the story - although beware, it does contain spoilers. Luck explains why Cook published it in 1962, a year after Wake in Fright, even though he'd written it earlier. He also discusses the real life inspiration for the novel. Chain of Darkness shows that Cook was not by any means a one-trick pony and I'm interested in reading more of his novels.
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