Desmond Lowden is a writer who interests me more as I find out more about the man and his work. He was far from prolific, publishing just eight novels between 1969 and 1990, as well as several screenplays. He achieved considerable success, and today's Forgotten Book, published in 1989, won the CWA Silver Dagger (an award that no longer exists). In other words, it was judged to be the second best crime novel of the year. When you consider that the winner was Colin Dexter (with The Wench is Dead) that is quite something. Yet after publishing just one more book, in the following year, he never published another novel. I do find that hard to understand.
The Shadow Run is a thriller which counterpoints two sets of relationships. One concerns a 'fat boy', a young lad at a private school called Joffrey, and his school friends. Joffrey has a troubled family background and he tells a lot of fibs. So when he spots blood coming from a van, nobody believes him. But this time he is telling the truth.
The other relationships involve a hardened criminal called Haskell. He's a man who uses people for his own ends and is determined to make a lot of money from an ambitious robbery. The details (which explain the title) are complex, but since they are related to the technology of the late 1980s, they are also now out of date. This lessens the impact of the later stages of the story for a modern reader, I think, as the worlds of Joffrey and Haskell converge.
The first part of the book is excellent, as Lowden establishes his characters in short, snappy chapters, with crisp dialogue and intriguing incidents. Lowden also makes good use of his great interest in music (Joffrey and some of his pals are members of a choir that sings in a cathedral). I can see why the book attracted such favourable attention at the time, but like so many books which rely on cutting-edge technical detail, it has lost a bit of its allure. Nevertheless, I was glad to read it, and I'm definitely curious as to why Lowden gave up on writing novels so soon after this one earned the Silver Dagger.
